Mother Alexandra was born in 1909 in Bucharest, Romania, the youngest daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, and was christened Ileana. She lived through the harrowing events of World War I and, being a perceptive child, fully comprehended the suffering which surrounded her. She early learned to follow her mother in works of charity.
At 22 she married Archduke Anton of Austria and lived in Sonnberg, Austria, giving birth to six children, two born during the Second World War. In March 1944, wishing to get away from the Nazi oppression, she moved the children to Romania. Here, at the foot of her castle of Bran, she built a hospital in memory of her mother, Queen Marie. She devoted herself to the care of the war-wounded and lovingly served the surrounding population. Subsisting and still working at the hospital, it was here she witnessed the end of the war and the communist takeover in August 1944.
Then began the sad exile's life, the "D.P." [Displaced Person-ed.] no one wanted. She and her family went first to Switzerland, then Argentina, and finally, obtaining scholarships for most of the children, they settled in Newton, Massachusetts. Their needs were met by the sale of jewelry and by Mother Alexandra's extensive lecture tours. When all the children were either married or had found sufficient employment, she fulfilled her great desire to devote her life entirely to God and became a nun. She founded the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, and reposed there in 1991.