Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York

by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Overview

On a winter's day in 1943, 21-year-old Latvian Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight - a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. In order to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS - the authors of such atrocities - Mischka volunteered to go on a student exchange to Germany. He did not then know that he was part Jewish. Whilst in Germany, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Surviving Hitler's Reich, he became a displaced person in occupied Germany, where in 1951 he earned a PhD at the exceptional Heidelberg Physics Institute. In the 1950s Mischka was sponsored as an immigrant to the US by a Jewish survivor whom his mother, Olga, had saved during Riga's worst period of Jewish arrests. As refugee experiences go, Mischka was among the lucky ones - but even luck leaves scars. The author Sheila Fitzpatrick, who met and married Mischka forty years after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey and survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350239180
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/25/2021
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sheila Fitzpatrick is Emerita Professor of History at the University of Chicago, USA and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. One of the most acclaimed historians of 20th-century Russia, she is the author of several books, including The Russian Revolution; Stalin's Peasants; Everyday Stalinism; Tear off the Masks!; and A Spy in the Archive: A Memoir of Cold War Russia (I.B.Tauris, 2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Mischka and Olga
1 Family
2 Childhood
3 Riga under the Soviets
4 Riga under the Germans
5 Wartime Germany
6 The Bombing of Dresden
7 Displaced Persons in Flensburg
8 Olga, from Flensburg to Fulda
9 Student in Hanover
10 Physics and Marriage in Heidelberg
11 Olga's Departure
12 Mischka's Departure
Afterword
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgements
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Beautifully written and deeply felt, the book is much more than a labor of love. It is a recreation of two significant lives, Misha's and his mother, Olga's, that together illustrate, indeed illuminate, a time and place in the turbulent twentieth century." --Journal of Modern History

From the Publisher

This well-researched tribute provides unconventional but persistently intriguing perspectives on the major totalitarian regimes of the 20th century…Mischka's War contains riveting disclosures.

The New York Times Book Review - Dagmar Herzog

this is slightly different: it’s not her life, but her husband’s, and throughout the book she wrestles with the rights and wrongs of this, unwilling to betray his memory, but unwilling to betray her “historian’s Hippocratic oath…’don’t leave things out because you don’t like them.’”

Robert Eaglestone

"‘Show yourself as you are, make the readers like you,' Fitzpatrick pleads with Mischka, the subject of her new biographical-historical investigation. It’s an unusual situation for any writer to be in. Mischka is her dead husband, yet she’s telling his story as a historian, reconstructing his early life from largely written sources... [his] strange move to Nazi Germany is at the heart of Fitzpatrick’s book. Implicit is the question of how a man she loved and respected could have made a voluntary decision to move to Hitler’s Germany four years into the war, apparently unperturbed by the racial situation there. It becomes even more odd when we learn that she discovered after his death that his Hungarian father was a Jew by bloodline, though he’d claimed throughout his adult life to be Catholic. And it takes on an eerie quality when we read that in winter 1944, Mischka took a tourist trip around his adopted homeland...The account of the Dresden bombing would alone be enough to make this fascinating book worth reading. There are few narratives published in English that record the experience on the streets that night in this much detail...It’s one of the pleasurable quirks of fate recorded here that it was in America that he met the Australian historian of the Soviet Union who made it her business to document his peculiar, sometimes maddeningly triumphant life."

Lara Feigel

[Fitzpatrick writes with] honesty about the man she loved, and the difficult choices he had to make, that makes this unusual – and at times uncomfortable – book so compelling”.

Saul David

"Sheila Fitzpatrick's extensive contribution to the history of Soviet Russia well deserves the acclaim it has received. The outstanding achievement of this section is Fitzpatrick's ability to trace the crisscrossings across northern Europe of the mostly separated mother and son(s)."

Judith Armstrong

A memoirist recounts her late husband’s survival in wartime Europe ... [Mischka] Danos, a theoretical physicist, was born in Riga in 1922 … He died in 1999. A few years later, [Sheila] Fitzpatrick [his third wife] opened a box he’d left behind. It contained his own diaries, along with his mother’s, all their long correspondence and many more documents and photographs. She could not resist trying to describe, to re-create even, the young man she never knew.”

Sue Gaisford