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## Franziska Schanzkowska: The Other Story
The life of Franziska Schanzkowska, as reconstructed from available records, overlaps with the Anderson story at a specific moment: her disappearance from Berlin in early 1920, approximately contemporaneous with the appearance of the unidentified woman who would become Anna Anderson.
Schanzkowska was born in approximately 1896 in a village in Pomerania — then part of Germany, now part of Poland — to a Kashubian Catholic family. Her father died in 1912. She moved to Berlin in 1914, changing her name from Czenstkowski to Schanzkowska.
Her time in Berlin before the First World War was marked by a series of hardships. She worked in a munitions factory. In 1916, a grenade exploded near her on the factory floor, killing or seriously wounding a coworker in her immediate vicinity. She suffered injuries and psychological trauma from the incident. She was subsequently declared mentally unstable, institutionalized for a period, and then released.
She had a fiancé who died during the First World War. By 1920, she was living in Berlin and then she disappeared.
The alignment between Schanzkowska’s disappearance and the emergence of “Miss Unknown” in Berlin in February 1920 was noticed by investigators and skeptics from the 1920s onward. The timing was consistent. The background details — working-class German immigrant, history of psychiatric institutionalization, factory accident — were consistent with aspects of Anderson’s story that did not fit the imperial identity she claimed.
Her 1979 intestinal surgery at a hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia, would prove to be the source of the biological material that resolved the question decades later. Tissue from that surgery was preserved in paraffin wax as a routine medical histological sample — a standard pathology practice that retains tissue indefinitely in a form that can support later analysis. The hospital retained the sample. It would be used for DNA testing in 1994, a decade after Anderson’s death.