There were, of course, other role models, beside his father, whose example inspired Paul's resolve to continue playing the piano. His blind mentor Josef Labor was one of them, Count Geza Zichy another. Though Paul had not yet met this eccentric and ebullient Hungarian aristocrat, he knew of him by reputation. Liszt had been dazzled by Zichy's one-armed piano playing; so too had the critic Eduard Hanslick, who described him in the Viennese press as "the greatest marvel of modern times on the piano." In 1914 Zichy, moved by the plight and sheer number of amputees returning from the front, wrote a self-help book, complete with photographic examples, showing the amputee how to eat a crayfish using his teeth, how to crush meat rather than cut it, how to wash a single hand by rubbing it with soap against the chin and how to get in and out of his underpants: "You must learn how to put your pants on by yourself," he insisted. "It would be too humiliating to have to ask someone else's help." Zichy's manual contained a preface by Dr. von Eiselsberg, the surgeon who had operated unsuccessfully on Karl's tumor in November 1912. "This book will comfort the amputee," Eiselsberg had written, "and it will also show him that, with an iron will, even the terrible loss of an arm may be borne more easily." In May 1915 the Count gave a piano recital in Berlin before an audience consisting entirely of one-armed soldiers. Paul knew nothing of this, but a copy of Zichy's book had been sent to him in Russia and when he and Zichy eventually met, Paul, though scathing of his artistry, was much inspired by his energy and enthusiasm.
A key source of inspiration to Paul in his darkest hours of captivity was Leopold Godowsky, a virtuoso Lithuanian, believed by many to possess the finest technique of any living pianist. Godowsky had created a sensation at his Viennese debut in 1904, playing his own firework version of Strauss's "Blue Danube" Waltz, as well as a short sequence of Chopin Studies spectacularly rearranged for the left hand alone. It is likely that Paul attended this concert. If not he would certainly have heard about it. "I can assure you I am the topic of Vienna," Godowsky wrote to a friend. "The criticism I got is in the Freie Fresse, the most important daily in Austria. The critic, I am told, is the terror of Vienna. All my friends are jubilant over the article he wrote and they say this will settle my name here."
After that Godowsky was invited back to Vienna many times, and early in 1909 he accepted the prestigious post of Director of the Piano School at the Imperial Academy of Music with the highest salary of any piano teacher in Europe. Godowsky's controversial left-handed arrangements of Chopin Studies were published between 1894 and 1914. Paul did not own copies of these pieces before the war but he knew all about them, and it was while recuperating in the hospital at Omsk that one day he carefully marked out the image of a piano keyboard in charcoal on an empty crate and, for the first time, attempted to figure out how Godowsky had succeeded in arranging Chopin's tempestuous "Revolutionary" Study for the left hand alone.
Paul had worked on this piece in its original two-handed form with Leschetizky and performed it at least twice in public--once at Graz in February 1914 and once at the Vienna Musikverein in March--so he knew the notes by heart. The puzzle was how to join the passionate, restless theme of the right hand to the rapid figurations of the left in such a way that both tune and accompaniment could be played simultaneously with only five fingers of one hand. Many pianists would have dismissed the idea as an impossibility, but Paul, aware that Godowsky had achieved it ten years earlier, was determined to figure out how.
Day after day and for hour upon hour, he addressed himself to this arduous and improbable task, tapping his freezing fingers on the wooden box, listening intently to the imagined music sounding in his head and creating, in the corner of a crowded festering invalids' ward, a tragicomic spectacle that aroused the sympathy and curiosity of his fellow prisoners and all the hospital staff.
A GLIMMER OF HOPE
Paul's relentless finger-tapping came to the attention of a thirty-two-year-old Danish diplomat called Otto Wadsted on one of his routine visits to the hospital. The Danes, neutral in the war, maintained a consulate at Omsk from which they were able to monitor the condition of prisoners and report to the Danish Red Cross. Consul Wadsted ran a dedicated office, taking pains to visit all the camps as regularly as the Siberian authorities would allow, aiding and befriending many of the Austro-Hungarians and Germans imprisoned there. A highly cultivated man, he was fluent in both French and German, widely read, a keen amateur painter and an enthusiastic violinist. Moved by Paul's plight and concerned for his physical and mental condition, he interceded with the Military Governor of Omsk, General Moritz, to ensure that as soon as he was discharged from hospital Paul could be transferred to a place of internment where there was a piano. In the first years of the war, Omsk was not equipped to accommodate the huge and sudden influx of prisoners from the west and so long as the concentration camps outside the town were still in the process of construction, captives were held in whichever buildings came to hand. These, in January 1915, included a circus, a cellar, a brothel and a disused slaughterhouse, as well as several hotels and private dwellings.
In Vienna Mrs. Wittgenstein had succeeded in opening a line of communication to Paul via her nephew Otto Franz, a diplomat working at the Austrian Embassy in Copenhagen. Franz was in direct contact with the Danish Foreign Office, which in turn received regular bulletins from Wadsted's Consulate at Omsk. In this way Franz was able to telegraph his aunt in Vienna on February 20, 1915: "Paul transferred to small hotel Omsk as of second half of January. Freedom of movement within the town. Has to report three times a week." Paul had already written to his mother to impart the same news, but his letter of February 2 failed to reach Vienna until March 28:
My dear, well-beloved and darling mother,
I have already been discharged from hospital as being in good health and, thanks to the intercession of the Danish Consul, have been given permission to remain here and live in town, which I am very happy about. So, the best thing is to write via registered mail via Copenhagen to the following address: Lieutenant P.W., prisonnier de guerre, Nomera Stepanovskaya, Omsk...I'm well: I'm even playing the piano. Am enormously pleased at every bit of news from home and sincerely thank all those who have written to me. My greetings to all! And to you, my dear mother, the most tender embraces from your son
Paul.
Twenty officers were billeted in the same hotel, sharing four to a room. All but two of them were Austro-Hungarians. Prisoners here were permitted to visit the town. At first, if they gave their word that they would return, they could come and go as they pleased, but their strict code of honor required them to attempt escape at all times. Too many tried to escape, and in the end exasperated Siberian officials restricted them to two town visits a week in groups of six under the strict supervision of an armed guard.
Every day for three months Paul practiced on a shabby, untuned upright piano that some say was brought to the hotel by a sympathetic Russian guard and according to others had been sitting disused in a closet in the hotel. His aim was to rearrange as many pieces as he could remember by heart into workable performing versions for the left hand. By late February he was able to write to his mother that he was feeling "splendid" and that if he were allowed to stay in the hotel he would have every reason to be happy. Mrs. Wittgenstein wrote to her youngest son: "Paul seems to be practising industriously. What a blessing for him!" Hermine was not so sure, for she feared that failure to succeed as a pianist could only prove devastating to Paul. "You were quite correct to suppose that he has already formed an opinion about his misfortune," she informed Ludwig, "and even though I fear that his sole aim is still to become a virtuoso I am nevertheless happy for him that he doesn't have to look for a completely new field of activity."
By the beginning of April 1915 Paul's confidence in his piano playing was such that he was able to send a message to his mother, via Consul Wadsted, via the Danish Foreign Office, via Otto Franz, to ask her to inquire of Josef Labor if he would compose a piano concerto for the left hand. Ludwig, on milit
ary duty in Vienna, had spent two days with Labor at his flat on the Kirchengasse on January 4 and 5, and the idea of composing a piano concerto for the left hand (something that had never been done before) may have been cooked up between the composer and the philosopher at this time, for when Mrs. Wittgenstein passed Paul's message to Labor he was able to tell her that he had been working on the piece for some time already.
Labor's blindness prevented him from writing down his own music; instead he composed by touch at the piano, feeling his way round the keyboard and memorizing each part, then playing it back to an amanuensis who took it down by ear. In the early days the composer's mother did this for him, later his sister Josephine, but by 1900 the task was always undertaken by one of his doting pupils called Rosine Menzel. By mid-May, Mrs. Wittgenstein found "dear Labor fully immersed in his composition for Paul--It is touching to see with what love and joy he sets about his work." The piece he planned was a Konzertstuck or short concerto-like piece in the key of D major, consisting of an introduction, five variations on an original theme, an intermezzo and a cadenza in improvised style. His aim was to send the music out to Paul in Siberia as soon as it was ready, but circumstances changed and the score, which was completed in June 1915, remained in Vienna until Paul's return.
Toward the end of March a letter from Consul Wadsted to the Royal Danish Embassy in Petrograd was intercepted by the Russians. It contained complaints about the manner in which Austro-Hungarian prisoners were being treated at Omsk--complaints that Wadsted had already voiced to the face of Alexei Plavsky, the commandant of the prison camps at Omsk. Plavsky, a choleric old general, anxious lest news of his rough and illegal treatment of prisoners should come to the attention of a higher authority, instituted a conspiracy against Wadsted, accusing him of acting as a spy for the Germans. Bogus witnesses were brought forth. A young Austrian officer, imprisoned at the same hotel as Paul, was sentenced to death for colluding. Pressure was applied to the Danish Embassy in St. Petersburg to have its Consulate at Omsk closed down and Consul Wadsted recalled. By chance the case came to the attention of Princess Cunigunde von Croy-Dulmen, a tenacious German aristocrat working as a volunteer POW camp inspector for the Red Cross. Acting above and beyond the call of duty, the Princess hired, at her own expense, a famous Russian defense lawyer who succeeded in exposing Plavsky's conspiracy and getting the Austrian officer's death sentence commuted to two months' imprisonment.
Unfortunately none of this happened in time to prevent Paul and his fellow officers of the small hotel from being transferred to a more secure and far nastier camp in the center of Omsk. Russian policy dictated that prisoners of Slav origin were to be treated with greater leniency than those of Germanic blood. This, it was hoped, would encourage the Slavs to switch sides and fight for the Russian army against the Hapsburg forces. The original plan was to hold all of them in European Russia so that the traitors among them could quickly and easily be deployed against the Austrians on the Galician front. German and Austrian POWs, or germanskis as the Russians called them all, were to be sent to Siberia and prov inces farther east, but, owing to the large numbers of captives and the incompetence and crookedness of the Russian system, thousands of Slav prisoners ended up with the germanskis in Siberia. General Moritz, the district Military Governor, had been accused, during the Wadsted conspiracy, of colluding with the Danish Consulate in placing Austrian and German officers at all the best places of internment while cramming the Slavs (contrary to official policy) into the crueler and more punitive prisons. Worried that his German surname and friendly associations with Wadsted's Consulate might make him suspicious in the eyes of Russian authority, Moritz hastily ordered that all germanskis interned at hotels and private houses be transferred to harsher camps to allow POWs of Slav origin to take their places. For Paul and the other officers at Nomera Stepanovskaya, this was a bitter blow.
BURIED ALIVE IN THE KREPOST
What Paul could not have known was that his transfer out of the hotel at Omsk would probably have taken place with or without General Moritz's intervention on behalf of the Slavs, for at the same time General Plavsky was under siege from the townsfolk of Omsk demanding that crippled POWs be removed from their streets. The daily spectacle of legless, armless, earless and noseless germanskis was proving detrimental to local morale. For this reason, Paul (along with 800 amputees) was moved into the town prison to be out of the sight of the sensitive townsfolk of Omsk.
The Krepost ("fortress" in Russian) is famous even today as the criminal dungeon into which the exiled Fyodor Dostoevsky was thrown in the middle of the nineteenth century, and which he later used as the setting for his novel, variously translated into English as Buried Alive in Siberia and The House of the Dead. In spirit little had changed there since Dosto-evsky's day. The POWs of 1914 called it "the big mousetrap"--a place of utmost horror. Built in the eighteenth century as an army barracks, few traces of the original structure remained standing, for when Paul arrived there it consisted of several low, wooden and brick shacks and an exercise yard, surrounded by a twenty-one-foot-high wooden palisade fence with six watchtowers for armed guards. Each shack was a single narrow, leaking, unheated room that held seventy prisoners with nowhere else to go. Nurse Brandstrom, who inspected the Krepost when Paul was there, reported to the Red Cross in Geneva, "as the weeks and months go by men of the highest culture, tortured by homesickness, are treated as were Russia's worst criminals seventy years ago." It was, she wrote, "universal opinion that even in Siberia the Krepost of Omsk is unique." In his memoirs (published in Berlin in the spring of 1918) the German officer Julius Meier-Graefe described it as a " dung-shack, an ice hole, a place to catch typhoid and other maladies, an establishment for lice. The Krepost is the endmost, a meanness, a dishonour to Russia."
For a Russian POW camp to be even barely tolerable the prison commandant (or nachalnik) and his assistant (praporshchik) needed to demonstrate qualities of kindness and competence. This sometimes happened, but not at the Krepost. Here the commandant, conscious of his social inferiority to the educated prisoners under his charge, issued pointless and sadistic commands purely to assert his power over them. He addressed them all as "German swine," had them stripped and horsewhipped in front of him, constantly searched, forced to run the gauntlet of Cossack knouts for minor offenses, and deprived of all manner of basic needs. One officer told a Red Cross inspector that he had been held in an unlit, unheated cell for thirty days simply for quipping that a place as unpleasant as the Krepost should be built in Germany for Russian prisoners. Another was beaten up and punished with three months' solitary confinement for making a sketch of the prison in oils. At the time of Paul's arrival all musical instruments were confiscated and the prisoners forbidden from singing or whistling. "Sheer malice" Paul called it at the time. He cursed the governor privately, and took to teaching his fellow prisoners French instead.
With over 1,000 interns the Krepost, originally built for 300 criminal prisoners, was grossly overcrowded. Those who could find no place on one of the hard bunks were forced to sleep on the bare asphalt floors. Bunks were placed edge to edge so close that the narrow gangway between them was scarcely wide enough for one person to pass. There was nowhere to sit and no furniture on which to put things. Prisoners were expected to eat their meals lying down or perched on the rungs of the bunk-bed ladders. The food was disgusting, for although it was prepared by the prisoners themselves, the daily meat ration, to which each officer was entitled, was sold by the prison guards for profit and substituted with scrag ends, boiled head, ear or hooves. Even the tea was made from water that some insane Krepost commandant had insisted be dragged up by the prisoners in buckets from the exact spot in the river where all the town's sewage was disgorged. For lavatories the prisoners had to make do with holes in the ground. Amputees with one or no legs needed to be supported by their comrades to use them and when a delegation of prisoners came forward to ask permission to construct a lavatory seat from a wooden box their request was sadi
stically turned down.
In the midst of all this homesickness, degradation and despair, some of the crippled officers of the Krepost were clinging to a distant hope. Paul was one of them. He had heard of Pope Benedict XV's initiative to bring the leaders of opposing belligerent nations to some agreement over the exchange of severely wounded and disabled prisoners. At first it was envisaged that some prisoners might even be home by Christmas, but negotiations dragged on and for months there was no news of a breakthrough.
That Paul was being considered as a possible exchange prisoner was known to him at least two months before he was transferred to the Krepost. Having heard nothing from him since January 3, his mother in Vienna continued to pester her nephew for news. Consul Wadsted telegraphed Franz by return: "GOOD NEWS. NAME APPEARS ON A PRELIMINARY LIST OF PRISONERS TO BE EXCHANGED. FINAL DECISION SOON. GOOD LUCK." Mrs. Wittgenstein wrote immediately to Ludwig: "You can imagine how happy I am! Even though it will require much more patience, as long as the matter has been put into motion, there is reason to hope that we may see Paul again in the foreseeable future."
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 10