Page 171 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

any hope of seeing him alive.

Thereon there was no information about my grandfather’s fate, as if he had
disappeared from the face of the earth leaving no trace and evidence of his being…
The poor Princess Elena’s tormented and exhausted heart refused to accept such
terrible loss. She deluged a local staff officer with requests to shed light on the
circumstances of her beloved Nicolai’s death, but the "red" officers were blind and deaf
to the entreaty of a lonely woman "from the nobility", as they contemptuously called
her. For them she was just one of thousands of nameless "numbered" units which meant
nothing in their cold and cruel world.

It was a genuine hell with no way back to her kind world where her house, friends
and everything to which she was accustomed since her childhood and loved dearly,
was... And there was nobody who would help or give the tiniest hope of survival…
The Seriogins tried to remain calm and collected and did their best to cheer up
Princess Elena, but she submerged into almost complete numbness deeper and deeper
and sometimes could spend days being indifferently-frozen and showing no reaction to
her friends’ attempts to save her heart and mind from submerging into the abyss of
depression.
There were only two things which could return her into the real world for a short
while – when someone started a conversation about her future child or there were any
details, even the most insignificant ones, about the supposed death of her beloved
Nicolai. She desperately wished to know what had happened and where her husband
was or at least where his body was buried (or just left).

Regrettably there is almost no information about the life of these two brave and
light people – Elena and Nicolai de Rohan-Hesse-Obolensky, but even those several
lines from two letters which Elena wrote to her daughter-in-law Alexandra,
miraculously preserved in the family archive of the latter in France, showed how
deeply and tenderly Princess Elena loved her missing husband.
There were only a few handwritten sheets of paper left; some lines are impossible
to decipher. But even that which could be easily read yells with the deep pain of a
human tragedy, hardly understandable and acceptable by those who have not been
through it.

April 12, 1927. Extract from the princess Elena’s letter to Alexandra (Alix)
Obolensky:
"Today I got very tired. I returned from Siniachikha absolutely broken. The
carriages, which are shameful even for cattle, are crammned with people ….......... We
stopped in the forest; it smelled so deliciously of mushrooms and strawberries…... It is
difficult to believe that the poor souls were killed exactly there! Poor Ellochka (the
great princess Elisabeth Fedorovna who was my grand-dad’s relative on the Hesse line)
was killed here, in this terrible Staroselimsky mine. This is horrible! My heart cannot
accept such a thing. Do you remember we always said on such an occasion: "may the
earth rest lightly on you"? Great Goodness, how can such earth rest lightly?!
Oh, Аlix, my dear Alix! How can one possibly get used to such horror?

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