Wartime queens

The involvement of the wives of presidents or kings in times of war has always had a strong emotional impact on the population. Even though the influence of the media in the first half of the last century was incomparable to that of today, the collective memory has preserved the memory of queens who showed courage and loyalty during the siege.

Queen Elisabeth (Queen Mother) of England

I have mentioned the Second World War and Queen Elisabeth (Queen Mother) and her children shared the dangers and difficulties of the rest of the nation. She was in Buckingham Palace when it was bombed in September 1940. She and the King visited badly damaged areas throughout the country after the air-raids and toured Britain visiting hospitals, factories and troops.

Queen Maria of Romania

In Romania, we have Queen Maria, nicknamed the “mother of the wounded” for her charitable work during the First World War. In November 1916, Queen Maria took refuge in Iasi, together with the other members of the Royal Family, accompanied by the Government, the Army and the Parliament. Every day, Queen Maria visited and cared for the wounded in the field hospitals, together with one of her daughters, Princess Ileana, who will later do the same in World War II. The brave queen faced all the dangers despite the fact that typhus was haunting the hospitals, and she had just lost her youngest child, Prince Mircea, who had just been killed by the same illness that was wreaking havoc. She even refused to wear rubber gloves.

Her example was followed by Princess Ileana, who later became Nun Alexandra. The beginning of the Second World War finds Ileana in Austria, with her family, but she wants and manages to return to Romania in 1943, when she joins the Red Cross in Brașov, to take care of Romanian soldiers. She is setting up a hospital in Bran where she will personally take care of the sick, as a nurse, until the hospital is disbanded by the communists. All these experiences appear in Princess Ileana’s memories book.

Queen Mother Elena

Another great queen of Romania during the Second World War was Queen Mother Elena, mother of His Majesty King Mihai I. Few people know about Queen Elena’s interventions and insistences that limited the deportation of Jews from Romania. In 1942, Queen Mother Elena publicly opposed the extension of deportations to areas other than northern Moldova and Bukowina. She was involved in sending an aid train to Transnistrian camps and repatriating orphans before the end of the war. Queen Mother Elena saved thousands of Jews from deportation, for which she received, after her death on March 11, 1993, the highest title of the state of Israel, that of “right among the peoples.”

Photo: Romanian Royal Family

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