and a dense, fragrant forest that buffered and disguised its isolation. Unlike boys of Mother’s aristocratic class, girls rarely attended public school or university. They were educated at home by tutors. “In Poland,” Mother explained with a sad smile, “girls like me learn Catholic religion, painting and embroidery—I was best for watercolor flowers.”
Mother never imagined she would have to rear children without a nanny or lift a finger to clean house. And she couldn’t have predicted that her elite world of luxury was doomed.
In 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered the Russian Tsar Alexander Nicholas II and his entire family—the last of a long line of autocrats that had ruled Russia since the 1500s. Violent purges followed. Like an avalanche of death, the Bolsheviks eradicated Tsarist sympathizers and rampaged into bordering countries including Poland. All wealthy landowners were suspected of having links with the Tsar. Unless those links could be manipulated, aristocratic families faced terrible consequences.
To save their seven sons from the Bolsheviks, the Olsezski parents were willing to sacrifice their only daughter, Hania—my mother. They concocted a preposterous plan: to convince Polish society and the Bolshevik spies that all but one member of the Olsezski family opposed the Tsar for his “sins against the people.” Her parents fabricated a friendship between the innocent Hania and the Grand Duchess Maria, one of the Tsar’s daughters. Hania would be publicly shamed and condemned for betraying her family, the honorable Olsezskis, staunch and loyal supporters of peasants and the common folk of Poland.
“Ach, Danusia, I am rebellious girl always.” Mother raised her flaccid arm to the sky. “Eighteen years old, I’m daughter in disgrace.”
Hania’s parents bribed an artisan papermaker in Warsaw to produce a few sheets of rich vellum paper encrusted with a counterfeit copy of the Royal Seal. Then they convinced Hania’s governess to forge a flowery letter in the style of eighteen-year-old Grand Duchess Maria, supposedly written to her secret friend, Hania Olsezska. The final bribe to Warsaw journalists stimulated reported stories affirming the Olsezskis’ vehement opposition to Tsarist principles. The fabricated letter that exposed Hania’s friendship with Grand Duchess Maria was passed around Warsaw’s opulent salons. And gossip flared.
Mother’s talent for storytelling was seductive. She lured me into the fictitious friendship between herself and the Grand Duchess Maria. She enticed my imagination with vivid scenes of intrigue and danger facing two reckless young women in a village near Tsarkoye Selo, the Tsar’s summer palace. Mother’s eyes sparkled with excitement as she described how the Grand Duchess “disguised as servant girl” in the palace kitchens persuaded a peasant farmer delivering fresh vegetables to transport her from the palace to the village. There, her adoring friend Hania waited in an aunt’s nearby cottage. A secluded, vine-covered dwelling—“My auntie Mariska, old and deaf, not know what we were talking”—became the friends’ perfect hideout.
Mother strutted about, head held high. “I’m remember every word of Grand Duchess Maria in letter,” she boasted. “‘How I loved pretending we were free,’” she recited. “‘Everyone else in the Olsezski family detest Romanovs for royal power over the people. You alone, dear Hania, are my secret friend who does not fear adventure.’”
Beguiled by Mother’s fervor, I absorbed the passion of two young women pursuing a forbidden friendship in a world where spies were everywhere. My body tensed when Mother paced around, hand pressed over her heart. As she glided toward the high-back kitchen chair and settled into the seat, I ascribed alluring grace to her and dismissed her thickened body. Her calloused fingers became beautiful and manicured. I even added a tasteful gold ring with a single pearl to her slim finger, my idea of a perfect gift from her parents. My longing for beauty and a respite from the drudgery of boarding house life allowed me to spontaneously transform Mother into the proud and privileged girl of her youth.
Neither Mother nor I would forget the romantic ending to the infamous letter.
“‘Write to me as you always have,’” Mother quoted from memory. “‘Address your letters to my lady in waiting, Baroness Sophie Buxhoevden, who will guard our secret. Forever your friend, Maria Nikolaevna Romanova.’”
In that long-ago patrician world of Warsaw, young Hania suddenly disappeared. Outsiders assumed that she was cloistered in shame, hidden behind the walls of the Olsezski estate; however, her parents had rushed their only daughter to a covert destination—Gdansk, the Polish seaport city. There they put young Hania aboard an ocean liner bound for America. Not speaking a word of English, she would travel alone.
In Gdansk, Hania cried bitter tears and embraced her parents for the last time. “They tell me, ‘You are only hope for us—have courage to save the family!’”
On the departure deck, Hania listened as her parents gave their final orders: on her first night at sea, Hania was to make her way, unobserved, to the aft deck and fling all her identity papers overboard. On her own, she would have to convince American Immigration that she was a political refugee seeking asylum. She’d have not a shred of evidence to link her with the Olsezskis. Her family’s very survival depended on her ability to disappear, validating the rumors of her betrayal.
While Hania journeyed toward an unknown future, her parents returned to Warsaw to stage press interviews. Publicly, the Olsezski patriarchs appeared outraged and vehement. Their rebellious daughter had not only betrayed her family, she had fled Poland without their knowledge. “Stories about me in all newspapers,” Mother said with a defiant nod as if daring me to contradict her. “I must leave my homeland behind,” she said, pausing to cross her hands over her heart—“forever!”
Arriving at the docks of Ellis Island, New York, a teenage Hania summoned up formidable courage. “I’m looking straight into eyes of Immigration mens,” she said. “They believe my story of persecution in Poland and welcome me to America! But with new name. No more Hania Olsezska—I’m become Harriet Olse.”
When she came to the end of her story, Mother sighed. Her ample bosom rose and fell with subsiding passion. Her eyes fluttered closed. Her cheeks, sagging and badly powdered, were streaked with tears. All traces of her patrician youth and vigor drained away, leaving only an exhausted old woman. She slumped in an ordinary chair and breathed the odors of leftover food in her boarding house kitchen.
Hania in America, 1920s
Was my mother’s story incredible? Of course it was. Yet I consumed it like manna for a starving soul. At night, I dreamt of Hania sobbing into bitter cold winds and flinging her identity papers overboard into the vast Atlantic Ocean. And I succumbed to a fantasy that Mother was not entirely betrayed by her parents, that she had left the Old World with tight bundles of jewels sewn into secret pockets of her clothes. How else could Hania and Juzo have purchased “them bigger and bigger houses” in America?
I yearned to give teenage Hania, arriving alone in America, a special gift—English fluency, a secret skill to make her life easier.
Decades later, advanced technology helped me fact check Mother’s tales of long ago against historical events. What I learned added layers of incongruities to Mother’s accounts of being banished to America. Research confirmed that Hania Olsezska, born in 1892, had arrived in America in 1911 (one year before the ill-fated crossing of the Titanic), when she was age nineteen. Glaring fact affirmed that Tsar Alexander Nicholas II and his family were not executed until 1918—years after Mother actually landed on American soil. Had Mother reinvented her past?
There had been a lot of unrest in Russia before the murders of the Romanovs. Perhaps, given the impending threats to Russia’s rigid class system,
