The causes of a disorder known as phantom limb pain, which affects all amputees, are still not clearly understood by the medical profession. Some believe that the brain continues to operate from a blueprint of the whole body even when parts of it have been removed. Others that the brain, frustrated at receiving no response from the missing limb, bombards it with too many signals, thus aggravating the nerves that originally served it. Whatever the cause, the symptoms are acute--a searing pain in the missing limb, a sensation that the absent fist or elbow is clamping tighter and tighter until it is about to explode, or that the whole limb is somehow inextricably twisted or bent. Looking to see that the arm is no longer there does not relieve the victim, for the pain will persist even when his eyes have confirmed that it cannot possibly be.
It was not until three weeks after his capture that Paul was permitted to write home for the first time. All prisoners' letters were subject to Russian censorship, but it was not for this reason that they tended to a cheerful tone. Quite apart from the obvious motive of not wishing to upset their families with details of their desperate state, many prisoners felt shame, even guilt, for having betrayed or dishonoured their families and comrades in arms by leaving the front line. The Swedish Red Cross nurse Elsa Brandstrom, known as the Angel of Siberia, did more than anyone to alleviate the suffering of Austro-Hungarian POWs, and told in her memoirs the pitiful story of one Austrian cadet: "A young man lay in the corner. No dumb animal in his father's farm had ever perished in such filth. 'Give my love to my mother; but never tell her in what misery I died' were his last words."
The reluctance of prisoners to tell the truth about the grueling circumstances of their captivity led to further problems with the mail, for all outgoing letters were checked not only by the Russians but also by the Kriegsuberwachungsamt, or KUA, the censorship department of the War Supervisory Office in Vienna. With so many cheerful missives arriving from Russia (75,000 in the month of December), an order was given out on Christmas Eve 1914:
Letters have been received lately from our prisoners of war in enemy countries. In some of these letters the writers describe life in captivity in a very favourable light. The spreading of such news among the troops and recruits is undesirable. The military censors are therefore to be instructed that such letters of our prisoners of war as may, by their contents, exercise an injurious influence are to be confiscated and not to be delivered to their addressees.
From the middle of August until the first week of October Mrs. Wittgenstein had remained in an anxious state. She had recently suffered an acute attack of phlebitis and her doctor had ordered her to hold her legs in a horizontal posture at all times. This prevented her playing the piano--the best method she knew for calming her nerves. Of Paul she had heard nothing for six weeks, his last letter being a complaint that none of hers were getting through to him. It was not until October 4 that she finally received, in barely legible scrawl, the news that he was still alive. Paul's letter to his mother has been lost, but Mrs. Wittgenstein's letter, in which she relays the news to Ludwig, survives:
My dear beloved Ludwig
I have written you many letters and cards with my thanks for all yours and for the telegram. I do hope that they have reached you at last. They bring you the most tender greetings and kisses from me, and all your sisters' love; and assure you that we are all well here and in Gmunden. A terrible misfortune has befallen our poor Paul who lost his right arm in one of the battles at the end of August [sic]. He wrote to me himself with his left hand on 14 September from the officers' hospital in Minsk and his news arrived three days ago. He also wrote that he was being looked after extremely well. You can imagine how I feel not being able to go to him. God protect you, my beloved child. I wish you could sense it whenever I think of you. For all your dear letters, be tenderly embraced by your Mama.
Leopoldine's card failed to reach Ludwig on his riverboat until October 28, by which time she had already posted him another: "I've not heard any more from Paul since the 4th," she wrote, "the day on which, after six weeks of waiting in vain, I received his letter from Minsk with the news of his serious injury. I imagine you must have received the card I wrote telling you that the poor boy has lost his right hand." Ludwig's immediate response can be found in his diary of October 28:
Received a lot of mail today, incl. the sad news that Paul has been seriously wounded and is in captivity in Russia--but, thank God, being taken good care of. Poor, poor Mama!!! ... At last a letter from Norway in which I am asked for 1,000 kronen. Is it possible for me to send it to him? Now that Norway has joined with our enemies!!! This is, in any case, a frightfully sad business. I keep having to think of poor Paul who has so suddenly lost his career! How terrible. What philosophy is needed to get over it! If only this can be achieved in any other way than suicide!! ... Your will be done.
On the following day Ludwig recorded: "Headache and tiredness in the morning. Thought a lot about Paul," while in Vienna his mother and sisters augmented their panic by imagining that Paul might now try to kill himself.
KURT WITTGENSTEIN IN AMERICA
For all her anxiety about the welfare of her sons, Mrs. Wittgenstein was equally concerned that the honor of the Wittgenstein family should at all times be upheld. She felt proud of Ludwig for having volunteered himself for the army and of Hermine and the Stonboroughs for volunteering themselves for hospital jobs. Her pride was also stirred by initial reports of Paul's heroism for which, she hoped, he might one day be decorated. In this she was encouraged by his former commanding officer, Colonel von Rettich:
November 11, 1914
My Dear Mrs. Wittgenstein,
I have obtained your address from Erwin Schaafgotsche. As former Colonel of the 6th Dragoons, I would like to offer my sincerest sympathy to you over the severe wounding of your son. You may be proud of him because the information he obtained as leader of a military patrol frustrated the efforts of the Russians to attack us at Zamosc. He has rendered outstanding service, for which I sincerely hope he will receive official recognition in due course. This is however not possible at the present time, for though your son was captured owing to his being wounded, it must yet be proven that this was due to no fault of his own. As this fact appears to have been established already he should find no further obstacles on his return. I have learned that the healing of his wound is progressing satisfactorily.
With my deepest respects, I remain, most sincerely yours,
Alfred von Rettich
Kurt, however, was a thorn. "Poor sidelined Kurt," as his mother referred to him, was not able to pull his weight on the front line. That he was safe in America was of no consolation to her or to her daughters in Vienna. In his letters home Kurt gave them the impression that he was doing everything in his power to return to Austria and reenlist in the army. Neither his age nor his less than satisfactory military service record counted against him. America's policy toward the conflict in Europe was officially neutral, so that U.S. residents (of whatever duration) were forbidden from actively taking sides in the European war. Kurt, as a reserve officer in the Austro-Hungarian 6th Dragoons, was consequently prohibited from leaving America as his stated intention was to rejoin the Austrian army.
He and his colleagues at the Austrian Consulate General involved themselves instead in a clandestine and illegal racket in false foreign passports, using them to repatriate U.S.-resident Austrians who, like Kurt, had found themselves stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Kurt's letters home revealed none of this, only that his American work was dull and that he wished to God he were in Europe fighting like his brothers for his country. His mother and sisters--particularly Hermine--felt the dishonor of his absence keenly: "I am most anxious at the moment for Kurt," she wrote to Ludwig. "He will have a bad time if everyone else has played their part and suffered, except for him! He'll feel as though he has been permanently marked down." And later: "I'm always having to think of poor Kurt and how terrible it is that he is not experiencing these times as we
are; you can hardly call what he is doing in America really living."
But Kurt's American existence may have been livelier than his sister had realized. His job--in what the Providence Journal described as "Consul General von Nuber's New York office of spies and tricksters"--presented him with varied opportunities. He played the piano, for instance, in a concert of Austrian and German folk music at the Aeolian Hall, hosted dinners at the Knickerbocker Club to raise money for a campaign to rouse Austrian expatriates, and gave interviews to American newspapers. But, despite his keenest efforts, American public opinion continued to swing to the side of the Entente Allies and away from Germany and the Central Powers. "It is not difficult to find a reason for the pro-British sentiment in America," Kurt indignantly told a reporter from the Washington Post in January 1915. "The British have been manufacturing sentiment over here in diverse ways ... I believe the American people are coming to realise their error, however."
Not so one of them, an elderly lady of German extraction living on Manhattan's Upper East Side called Delia Steinberger (Jerome's widowed mother), who felt so strongly pro-British and anti-German that she had her surname changed (fifteen years after her son had done the same) to the more English-sounding Stonborough, falsely claiming, on her U.S. census return, that both her parents had been born in England.
Kurt paddled bravely against the powerful current of American anti-German feeling: "The reports I have from home are entirely satisfactory," he told the Post, "and I am confident that we must win." The Russians had been "hammering away" at the "practically impregnable" fort of Przemysl for months to no effect and so long as Przemysl continued to hold out, the enemy stood "no chance." But his patriotic optimism was ill founded. At the time of his speaking the casualty rate among the original infantry units of the Austro-Hungarian army was 82 percent. Two months later on March 22 the Austro-Hungarian commander Hermann Kusmanek surrendered the fort at Przemysl, leading 119,000 of his men on the long march into Russian captivity.
Kurt kept his job in New York for another two years, despite surges of public pressure to have him and his colleagues at the Consulate expelled from America. First there was the scandal concerning fake passports; this was followed by public outrage at the revelation of millions of dollars secretly channeled by the Germans to Austrian diplomats for war propaganda in America; and then a story that the Austrian Consulate was paying for advertisements that threatened the livelihood of Austrian workers in American munitions factories. These advertisements, which were printed in dozens of American newspapers, read as follows:
The Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Embassy, acting under orders from the home Government, gives notice by this announcement to all Austrian and Hungarian citizens that all workmen who are employed in factories in this country which are making either arms or ammunition for the enemies of their country are committing a crime against the military safety of their fatherland. This crime is punishable by ten to twenty years' imprisonment and, in especially aggravating circumstances, with the penalty of death. Against those who violate this order, the whole weight of the law will be brought in the event of their return to their own country.
Each successive scandal renewed the calls to have all Austro-Hungarian diplomats expelled from the U.S. In 1915 the Austrian Ambassador in Washington, Konstantin Dumba, was expelled, but nothing was done about the rest of them, until America joined the war in the spring of 1917, when all diplomatic relations between the two countries were finally severed.
On the afternoon of May 4 that year at Hoboken Pier, Kurt, along with Dumba's replacement as ambassador, Count Adam Tarnowski, the Consul General from New York, Alexander von Nuber, and 206 so-called "enemy officials" under the surveillance of a cohort of American secret service agents, boarded the Holland-America liner Ryndam bound for Holland. At Halifax the ship was held over for five days as British intelligence officers interrogated everyone on board. After that she was permitted to sail on to Rotterdam under a safe-conduct pass, proceeding north of the Faroe Islands to avoid the submarines and mined zones.
Mrs. Wittgenstein, who seems to have known nothing of her son's American expulsion and had not heard a word from him in several months, was as surprised as she was delighted to read his telegram of May 17: ARRIVED ROTTERDAM TODAY IN GOOD HEALTH. WEDNESDAY VIENNA. KURT.
Hermine, bored stiff in her voluntary job as a supervisor at an outpatient clinic, greeted the news of her brother's return with enthusiasm. "I've just learned that Kurt has arrived in Rotterdam," she wrote to Ludwig. "I'm very happy for him, I can tell you! His situation after the war would have been extremely uncomfortable!"
ARRIVAL IN SIBERIA
For his twenty-seventh birthday on November 5, 1914, Paul was cooped up in a freezing, slowly moving cattle wagon. One-armed and distressed, he had been shunted from hospital to hospital for nearly three months, so that by the time he had passed the Urals into the vast and empty steppe of Western Siberia it was winter and the weather was biting cold. With temperatures dropping as low as 76 degrees below zero, the sliding doors of the teploshki, which had been rolled open in the morning hours of the early autumn--affording him welcome ventilation and spectacular views of the great sunflower plains of the Volga--were now kept firmly closed. Sickness, despair and filthy odors suffused the darkness within. When a man died his corpse remained on board until the next change of guard-sometimes several weeks later. In February 1915 two boarded-up wagons arriving at the southeastern city of Samara were found to contain sixty-five prisoners, only eight of whom were still alive. The carriages were shunted a mile out of town, where Russian guards with axes and spades removed the fifty-seven frozen bodies and threw them into a hole dug by the side of the track. This was not uncommon. Boarded-up wagons arriving at Moscow and Omsk thought to contain valuable goods turned out, upon inspection, also to be filled with frozen corpses.
In accordance with Article 17 of the Hague Convention, Paul was entitled, as a junior officer, to payment of fifty rubles a month with which to buy food, soap and other necessities. In reality the money was seldom received. To avoid payment Russian officials ensured that prisoners were transferred out of camp on the day before their pay was due. In transit, the duty for distributing the prisoners' cash fell to the transport commandant of each train. Some were honest, but many sought to embezzle the money, claiming inability to find the correct change. On such occasions prisoners were left with no nourishment, having to subsist, sometimes for days on end, on nothing but kiputok--boiling water provided free of charge at each station along the line.
As a junior officer Paul received marginally more humane treatment from his captors than that which they meted out to the rank and file. POW officers were not obliged to work for the Russians, but soldiers in the ranks were put to manual labor--25,000 of them perished constructing the Murman Railway in the winter of 1914-15.
Omsk, a city situated at the confluence of the rivers Om and Irtysh in the gubernL or province of Akmolinsk some 1,600 miles east of Moscow, is the capital of Western Siberia. In 1914 it had a resident population of 130,000 which, within four years, was increased by 96,000 prisoners of war. In the ten months to August 1915, some 16,000 of them died there. On his arrival at Omsk station, Paul was hauled off the train in a blizzard and escorted under armed guard to a modern vodka distillery recently converted into a POW hospital. Others from the same train were escorted to prison camps outside the town, some as many as thirty miles away. Frozen, homesick, underdressed, many of them died before reaching their destinations.
At the entrance to the hospital Paul was handed a blank postcard on which to write to his family informing them of his new location before being pushed into a communal bathroom on the ground floor where his face and hair were shaved, his clothes were taken for disinfection and he was ordered to bathe. Though bitterly cold, the hospital at Omsk was preferable to many of the places of internment that Paul had visited en route. All the Russian hospitals were suffering from a shortage of bandages and medicine, bu
t at least Omsk was cleaner than the one at Orel (where Paul had been placed in the same ward as typhoid and diphtheria victims); it was less crowded than the hospital at Moscow (which held 4,000 patients); and safer than the Nikolai in Petrograd, where the guards were insanely brutal. It was here, in the officers' ward, that an Austrian captain was bayoneted in the back for attempting to go to the lavatory. The sentry's blade punctured his lung and in a hasty court judgment he (the guard) was acquitted of wrongdoing, while the severely wounded officer and three invalid prisoners who had testified on his behalf were each sentenced to six years' hard labor.
THREE SOURCES OF INSPIRATION
Paul's decision to continue his career as a concert pianist, despite the loss of his right arm, was taken in the early days of his captivity, long before he had reached the hospital at Omsk. The alternative to success was not failure but death, and although his mother and sisters anxiously scoured letters from Russia for hints that he might be contemplating suicide, the trauma of his condition had, if anything, made him more determined than ever to return to his homeland and resume his concert career. He had been groomed by his father to confront fear and despise self-pity, and these lessons were taken to heart. In a solitary effort of will, he trained himself to understate the gravity of his condition and to dismiss, often quite rudely, the sympathy of friends and their well-meaning offers of help. If, at any stage, he had feared for his future as a five-fingered pianist, at least he would have relished the opportunity to face that fear down. The means by which he put his courage to the test often disconcerted his friends. He would astound them by swimming, one-armed, far out to sea in lightning storms, by striding within inches of the upper edges of the great cliffs of Dover or by balancing along the high iron-framed railway track that crosses the marshes at Southwold. His secretary once screamed when she came into his New York apartment to find him tightrope-walking along a thin balcony parapet with a drop, on one side, of 200 feet to the concrete pavement below.
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 9