Army, the composer watched his mother and the husband of his sister Vera fall ill with typhus, both dying in the chaos at Novorossiysk. Bortkiewicz sought to escape from Yalta and succeeded in obtaining passage on the steamer "Konstantin", which brought them safe, but impoverished, to Constantinople in November 1919. Between the wars In Constantinople, with the help of the court pianist to the Sultan, Ilen Ilegey, Bortkiewicz began to give concerts and started teaching again. He became well known throughout a number of embassies and made the acquaintance of the wife of the Yugoslavian ambassador Natalie Chaponitsch, to whom he dedicated his Trois Morceaux, Op. 24 (1922). She organised musical gatherings for Bortkiewicz within the embassy, and it was with the help of her husband that the composer and his wife were able to obtain a visa for Yugoslavia. Bortkiewicz and his wife came to Sofia via Belgrade, where they had to wait for some time before obtaining an Austrian visa. On 22 July 1922 the composer and his wife reached Austria. Initially Bortkiewicz chose Baden as his residence, where he remained until 1923. He then moved and settled in Vienna, where he was to remain for the next five years. In 1926 he obtained Austrian citizenship. In 1928 Bortkiewicz went to Paris for six months and then returned to live in Berlin. In 1933 he was forced to leave Germany again—being a Russian he was now facing persecution from the Nazis and saw his name being deleted from all music programmes. He returned to Vienna, where he established residence at Blechturmgasse 1 door 5 in 1935. He lived there for the rest of his life. It was during these years that Bortkiewicz suffered with serious financial difficulties and needed to ask for financial help from his friend Hugo van Dalen many times, which the pianist always gave freely. It was also during this period that he translated from Russian into German the letters between Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck. These letters were published as Die seltsame Liebe Peter Tschaikowsky's und der Nadjeschda von Meck (Köhler & Amelang, Leipzig 1938). Van Dalen adapted Bortkiewicz's book for a Dutch readership and published it as Rondom Tschaikovsky's vierde symphonie (De Residentiebode, 1938). Second World War World War II profoundly affected Bortkiewicz and his wife. At the end of the war he described in a letter dated 8 December 1945