Another Madame Michaelis appears in the pages of the apocryphal memoir by Jacqueline Monsigny “Les filles du Tsar,” mentioned elsewhere in the Alexander Palace website. According to Mme. Monsigny, “Mme. de Michaelis” is identified as a pseudonym of the GD Tatiana! The author quotes from a purported letter of GD Olga to GD Maria composed about the year 1934 and which appears to have been the first communication between the two sisters since both left Russia in 1918. (One can say that the character conveyed by the writer of this letter would seem to me to be compatible with what is certainly known of GD Olga.) It relates that the women of the Imperial family, having been transported to Perm from Ekaterinburg, were “separated” from one another in the fall of 1918, though Anastasia had already run away by then. GD Maria was taken to Moscow and GD Olga, Tatiana and the Empress now in a semi-comatose condition were eventually evacuated to Lemburg or Lvov in the newly constituted Poland. After a “few days” the GD Olga was visited by two men who appeared to be Bolshevik agents who placed her in the keeping of Polish agents. These last gave her a “bundle of lire” and an Italian passport under the name of “Magda Boots”. (This name later has appeared as “Magda Boodts”.) She was told to depart post-haste for Italy. While Olga wanted to stay with her sister and invalided mother, she had to obey. Tatiana promised to never leave her mother who was now unable to move and hardly able to speak. Immediately before Olga left, she learned that GD Tatiana also received papers indicating that her new name would be “Madame Michaelis”. Tatiana and the Empress remained under the protection of the Polish government and Count Andrei Szepticky, the Bishop of Lvov and the Uniate Metropolitan of the Ukraine (in union with the RC Church). Bishop Count Szepticky was a personal friend to all the popes from Leo XIII through Pius XI, the Pontiff at the time of these events. (It was the Vatican that authorized the protection of the Empress and GD Tatiana.) Sometime before WWII, the GD Olga, Maria, and Tatiana were able to re-unite around the bed of the Empress in the monastery of Bon-Repos at Lvov at the end of a great avenue, the Potokski Ulitsa.
Tatiana had “found the peace of the soul in the convent and dreamed more and more of taking vows,” though she would not consider leaving her mother “until [the Empress took] her last breath.” Olga had found her own peace in running an orphanage at Mennaggio on Lake Como. She would never abandon that work. With the coming of WWII and the German and Russian invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, GD Tatiana and the Empress were in the greatest danger since the Revolution. Mme. Monsigny says that GD Tatiana as “Madame de Michaelis” disappeared in a German concentration camp. She says as well that the Empress met the same fate. However, the main source for Mme. Monsigny, Alexis de Durazzo, the purported grandson of GD Maria, said in his book that the Empress was successfully evacuated to a monastery near Florence where she died and was buried sometime between 1940 and 1942. The exact date of her death and place of burial is unknown. I suspect that the referencve to a Mme. Michaelis in the post by "Real Anastasia" above was possibly a Soviet plant, the real GD Tatiana already dead by that time.
