Nora Gräfin Kinsky (1888–1923)

Nora Gräfin Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau was the sixth of nine children of an Austro-Hungarian family. Baroness Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, was her paternal aunt. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Countess Nora became a Red Cross nurse and founded a hospital. For her work with the wounded and her language skills, she was chosen as an official Red Cross visitor to the German prisoner-of-war camps in Russia, infamous for their miserable conditions and high mortality. She recorded these experiences in her diary. On her travels through Russia and Siberia, the Countess visited 16 POW camp and 15 labor camps, where she assisted in surgeries and other medical interventions under the most primitive circumstances. She was an eyewitness to the Russian Revolution before her return home in 1918. She married Ferdinand Graf Wilczek and gave birth to her first daughter in 1921. She died in childbirth in 1923, along with her second baby. The Countess's journal was published as Russian Diary: 1916-1918, with an introduction by her daughter. A biography entitled I Have Lived Too Short: The Story of Nora Countess Kinsky, by Monica Czernin, was published in 2005 and a documentary film called The Countess and the Revolution: Nora Kinsky, the Red Cross Baroness, was made in 2007.