Risked (The Missing ) (25 page)
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Authors: Margaret Peterson Haddix
Just as the killings were botched, so were the attempts to hide the bodies afterward. Yurovsky had planned to dump all the bodies down a deserted mine shaft in an uninhabited area outside the city. But the truck broke down and got stuck in mud, and Yurovsky’s men were forced to move the bodies part of the way in carts. They encountered peasants preparing to mow hay, and Yurovsky had to send men into a nearby village to tell people to stay out of
the area—so much for the idea of secrecy. Then when the men dropped the bodies into the mine shaft, the water at the bottom proved to be too shallow to cover them. The men threw grenades down into the shaft, hoping to collapse the walls onto the bodies, but this failed too.
With the sun already up by then, Yurovsky realized he’d just need to leave guards near the mine shaft and come back later to move the bodies again.
More car and truck problems and a series of injuries complicated Yurovsky’s second night of trying to hide the bodies elsewhere. He resorted to doing his best to disguise the bodies so that even if they were found they wouldn’t be recognized. His men threw sulfuric acid into a collective grave they dug, and this ate away at the corpses. Also, Yurovsky later wrote, he had his men separate two of the bodies from the rest so the men could burn them and bury them elsewhere. He reasoned that anyone finding just nine bodies would not automatically know that it was the Romanovs and their servants.
The official story about the killings that went out on July 20—just five days before Ekaterinburg did indeed fall to the army that would have rescued the Romanovs—was that only the former tsar had been killed; the rest of the family was said to be alive and well and in a hidden location.
That original lie fed rumors later on that at least one
of the Romanovs had somehow escaped. As the years passed, a variety of pretenders cropped up claiming to be Romanovs. The most attention went to a woman named Anna Anderson, who turned up in Germany in 1920 and managed to convince many people—including some Romanov relatives—that she really was Anastasia. Multiple authors wrote books that advanced or discredited her story; a TV movie based on her life billed her as “the great romantic enigma of the twentieth century.”
When Anna Anderson died in 1984, it seemed that she had carried her secrets to the grave. However, DNA tests done ten years later proved conclusively that Anna Anderson could not have been Anastasia.
The actual whereabouts of the Romanovs’ bodies remained secret—at least publicly—during most of the history of the Soviet Union. An amateur historian and a filmmaker found some of the bodies in the 1970s, but they didn’t feel it was safe to reveal their discovery for another decade. In 1991 the skeletal remains were finally dug up and studied and analyzed, and scientists determined that they belonged to Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of their daughters, along with the three servants and Dr. Botkin.
Alexei’s body was missing, and so was one sister’s, although scientists disagreed about whether it was Anastasia or Maria.
For a while, the two missing bodies fueled even more speculation. But then, sixteen years later, remains of two more bodies were found nearby. These remains were broken and burned, fitting with the claim that Yurovsky and his men had unsuccessfully tried to cremate two of the bodies before burying them.
According to scientists, the DNA tests on those remains were conclusive: They belonged to the missing Romanov children. In real history, there was never any hope for any of the Romanovs from the moment they stepped into that cellar in the middle of the night on July 17, 1918.
But what does it say about human nature that so many people wanted to believe, so desperately, for so many years, that at least one of the children had lived?
Volumes have been written about the Romanovs and their horrific deaths. I am grateful to all the researchers, scientists, writers, and translators who have worked to ferret out the truth and share it with the rest of the world. Given what is known now, I found it a little amusing that so many of the books published before 2007 claimed to “prove” implausible scenarios to account for the missing bodies. But many of those older books were useful for background information and eyewitness accounts. I greatly appreciated the 2008 book
The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinaburg
by Helen Rappaport, because it provided newer information and focused so precisely on the Romanovs’ time at the Ipatiev House. For a broader overview of the Romanovs’ lives (and for its many, many pictures), I also appreciated
Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra
by Peter Kirth.
Useful resources I found online included
http://www.romanov-memorial.com/
, which has detailed blueprints and pictures of the Ipatiev House. It was also helpful (though unsettling) to read the eyewitness accounts from Yurovsky and some of the other assassins online at
http://www.kingandwilson.com/FOTRresources/
.
In addition to the books and online resources I used for
research, I am also very grateful to Rob Alexander, executive director of the Central Ohio chapter of the National Hemophilia Foundation, for answering my questions about what Gavin’s experiences with hemophilia would be like in the modern world.
MARGARET PETERSON
HADDIX
is the author of many critically and popularly acclaimed YA and
middle-grade novels, including the Shadow Children series. A graduate of Miami
University (of Ohio), she worked for several years as a reporter for the
Indianapolis News
. She also taught at Danville (Illinois)
Area Community College. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.
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ARGARET
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ETERSON
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ADDIX
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ISSING
S
ERIES
Found
Sent
Sabotaged
Torn
Caught
T
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HADOW
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HILDREN
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ERIES
Among the Hidden
Among the Impostors
Among the Betrayed
Among the Barons
Among the Brave
Among the Enemy
Among the Free
The Girl with 500 Middle Names
Because of Anya
Say What?
Dexter the Tough
Running Out of Time
Game Changer
The Always War
Claim to Fame
Palace of Mirrors
Uprising
Double Identity
The House on the Gulf
Escape from Memory
Takeoffs and Landings
Turnabout
Just Ella
Leaving Fishers
Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haddix, Margaret Peterson.
Risked / Margaret Peterson Haddix. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (The missing ; bk. 6)
Summary: Jonah, thirteen, and Katherine, eleven, travel through time to 1918 Russia just as Alexei, Anastasia, and the rest of Tsar Nicholas II’s family is about to be executed. Author’s note includes facts about the Romanovs and the mystery surrounding their deaths.
ISBN 978-1-4169-8984-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4424-2647-4 (eBook)
1. Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868–1918—Family—Fiction. [1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Aleksei Nikolaevich, Czarevitch, son of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1904–1918—Fiction. 3. Anastasia, Grand Duchess, daughter of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1901–1918—Fiction. 4. Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H1164Ris 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012006770