A German general stood before Princess Alice in her Athens home and asked if there was anything he could do for her. She met his gaze and said, “You can take your troops out of my country. ”
The men who had invaded her country didn’t realize they were standing in the presence of a woman who was risking everything. While they treated her with respect, believing she sympathized with their cause because her daughters had married Germans, she was hiding a Jewish family in her home.
If the Germans had discovered them, she would have been executed. Alice of Battenberg was born in Windsor Castle with Queen Victoria herself present at her birth. Her bloodline was among the bluest in Europe. But her life was no fairytale.
When she reached the age where children begin to speak, she didn’t. Month after month passed in silence. When words finally came, they were broken and difficult. Her family eventually learned the truth: Alice was deaf.
She taught herself to speak and lip-read in both English and German. Her disability never stopped her. But her family never quite stopped thinking something was wrong with her. At the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, sixteen-year-old Alice met Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark.
It was love at first sight. Within a year, they were married. They had four daughters, and then a son. That son would grow up to be Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1908, Alice visited Russia and met her aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna. The Bolsheviks would later murder Elizabeth alongside the rest of the Romanovs. Her aunt’s deep religious faith inspired Alice. She gave away most of her possessions and began preparing for a more spiritual life.
World War I brought disaster. Alice’s brother-in-law, King Constantine I of Greece, refused to take a side in the conflict. French forces bombarded Athens, and Alice huddled in the palace cellars with her children. By June 1917, the Greek people had had enough of their royal family.
Constantine was forced to abdicate, and the entire family was exiled to Switzerland. In 1920, supporters restored Constantine to the throne, and Alice returned with her family. It didn’t last. Greece lost the Greco-Turkish War, and a military coup seized power.
The royals were exiled again. Prince Andrew was now a target. Officers with ties to the monarchy were arrested. Andrew was held in captivity while other men arrested alongside him were tried and executed.
Alice waited, not knowing if her husband would survive. The British sent the HMS Calypso to evacuate them. The family settled in Paris with other Greek refugees. Around this time, Alice began claiming she received divine messages.
She told people she was in direct contact not only with Jesus Christ but also with the Buddha. Her family grew alarmed. The finest psychiatrists in Europe examined her and delivered the same diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. The royal family decided they knew what to do with her.
Alice was forcibly separated from her children and sent to Bellevue Sanatorium in Switzerland. It was a luxury facility, the kind where the world’s richest patients stayed. To Alice, it was a prison. Her doctors consulted Sigmund Freud, who concluded that Alice’s hallucinations were caused by sexual frustration.
The same answer he gave to most of his patients. Alice insisted she was sane. She begged to be released. Several times she tried to escape, but the guards always brought her back.
She remained locked up for two years. By the time she was freed, her life had moved on without her. Her daughters had married German princes. Her son Philip had gone to Britain to live with Alice’s brothers.
She had grown distant from her husband. Alice wrote to her mother after her release but refused contact with everyone else in the family. They had betrayed her once. She would not trust them again.
She spent the years leading up to World War II living quietly in Central Europe, then settled in Athens. When the war came, she set up a base with the Red Cross, organizing soup kitchens and smuggling medical supplies into Greece from Sweden under the guise of visiting her sister. Her daughter Cecilie, son-in-law, and two of her grandchildren died in a plane crash in 1937. At the funeral, Alice saw her husband and her son for the first time in six years.
Philip had been a boy when she’d last seen him. Now he was a strapping sixteen-year-old. The reunion was tearful, and Alice finally resumed contact with her family. But it was too late to save her marriage.
Prince Andrew died of heart failure in Monaco in 1944. He had barely seen Alice since sending her to the sanatorium fourteen years earlier. In 1943, the Germans occupied Athens. They deported around sixty thousand Greek Jews to concentration camps.
Nearly all of them died. German forces assumed Alice had stayed because she supported the Axis. They respected her. A German general personally visited and offered to do anything for her.
She refused his help. Princess Alice also hid the Cohen family. Haimaki Cohen had been a political ally of King George I of Greece, and the king had promised to help him if he ever needed it. By 1943, the king was dead, but his promise lived on.
Cohen’s son approached Alice, and she took in the family, sheltering them from the Germans for the rest of the war. When the Allies liberated Athens in 1944, the danger didn’t end. Communist guerrillas fought the British for control of the city, turning the streets into a battleground. British forces begged Alice to stay inside.
She walked the streets openly, distributing food rations to children. A man warned her that a stray bullet could kill her. She replied, “They tell me that you don’t hear the shot that kills you, and in any case, I am deaf, so why worry? ”
Conditions in Athens grew terrible.
For months, Alice went without meat entirely. By the time the British arrived, she had lived on nothing but bread and butter for weeks. When a British statesman finally tracked her down, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria was living in squalor.
Alice didn’t leave Athens until 1947, when her son Philip was getting married. She sat at the royal wedding and met the future Queen Elizabeth II. She had come a long way from begging for her freedom in a sanatorium. She returned to Greece.
She had founded the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, fulfilling the dream her aunt had shared with her years before. In 1953, she stood in a simple gray dress and wimple at Elizabeth’s coronation. The 1967 colonels’ coup made Greece too dangerous for her. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip invited her to live at Buckingham Palace.
People whispered that the prince’s mother had gone senile. They were wrong. Though incredibly frail and deafer than ever, Alice remained lucid until the end. She died on December 5, 1969, in Buckingham Palace.
She left no possessions at all. Charitable to a fault, she had given everything away. Years after her death, she was declared Righteous Among Nations by Israel for saving the Cohen family. Her final wish was to be buried at the Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
In 1988, she got her wish. But the most heartbreaking detail of her story emerged after her death. After the people she trusted most sent her to that sanatorium in 1930, Princess Alice barely saw any of them for the rest of her life. Years after the war, she revealed to Philip in a letter just how dire things had been for her during the occupation.
She had gone months without meat. By the time the British arrived, she had been surviving on nothing but bread and butter for weeks. The liberation came just in time. And it was the only reason Alice lived to see her son marry, to walk the halls of Buckingham Palace, and to be buried in Jerusalem.
Her story wasn’t a fairytale. She was abandoned, locked away, and betrayed by her own family. But she carried herself through the darkest days with a quiet strength that few ever recognized. In the end, she gave away everything she had and asked for almost nothing in return.
She just asked to be remembered for who she really was.
