by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
I can’t tell for sure how Misha/Mischka would have felt about being the posthumous subject of my detached (or, to be honest, relatively detached) enquiry. He thought himself wiser than me with respect to philosophy and morals, but not necessarily with respect to people and everyday life: after a while he conceded that people were my realm, just as nature and anything mechanical were his, and that my gaze, although detached, was, in another of his favourite words, ‘benign’. It was important for him that I understood him as a Person (his word, his capitalisation); that’s why he wrote the musings.
More broadly, it was important to him to be understood (and presumably remembered, too, though his anti-death stance did not allow discussion of this) in all his unique individuality; his sense of his own stature required it. Aware that he had repressed some aspects of the 1940s, he tried in the 1990s to recover memories from this time—the musings on the Dresden bombing and the Jewish graves in the forest outside Riga are examples—which he would email to me as presents when I was away at my job in Chicago. Although I am by no means certain of this, he may even have thought that I had a better chance of sorting out the residual mess inside him from the 1940s than he did. In any case, he didn’t have time to finish the sorting out, and this book is my attempt to do so—an offering of love that is also, I hope not contradictorily, a search for knowledge and, finally, a completely selfish effort of mine to join his anti-death league and have him back.
Mischka and Olga
Michael and Olga Danos, 1940s.
THIS mother-and-son photo from the Danos family collection is undated, but Misha, born in Riga, Latvia, in 1922, looks to be in his early twenties, which puts Olga in her mid forties. The photo could have been taken any time during the war or even after it, but not later than 1949. That was the year that Misha, having become Mischka in his new German context, married the young German Helga Heimers. Unlike the slapdash Olga, or Mischka-the-budding-physicist with his mind on higher things, Helga was an orderly person who labelled and dated family photographs.
If the photo was taken in 1940, that was the year Misha had just finished school and started his first job at Riga’s State Electrotechnical Factory, (VEF). Olga at that point was separated from his father and living in the workshop of her fashion atelier, but the sons remained in close contact and often dropped round for tea (the object bottom right in the photo seems to be a teapot; the things or person obscuring Misha’s right shoulder are unidentified). Or it could have been taken in the autumn of 1941, when Misha entered the University of Riga as an engineering student. In this short period, Latvia had changed its status more than once, successively falling under Soviet occupation, ceasing to be an independent state and becoming a constituent part of the Soviet Union, and then being occupied by the Germans. Misha, of call-up age under all three regimes, had managed to avoid conscription into any of these armies, which was a good thing as the Danoses—despite their competence in all three languages—had no enthusiasm for any of the regimes.
There were lots of leave-takings and reunions in 1944–45, any one of which could have been the occasion for the photo. In the spring of 1944, to escape the conscription into the German forces that now seemed inevitable, Misha went off to study in Germany, a scheme probably hatched by Olga. In the following months, as Soviet forces advanced and it became clear that they were about to reoccupy Latvia, Olga started planning her own departure and that of the other two sons. The photo could have been taken in Riga in the summer, when Mischka made a brief farewell visit from Germany, or a few months later in Dresden or the Sudetenland, where he and Olga met up again after she moved her tailoring business to the region. By this time, it was clear that they were the only two family members who had got out: an attempt by the other two sons to leave Latvia by sea, organised by Olga, had failed, and as Latvia had been incorporated into the Soviet Union, they were now willy-nilly Soviet citizens living behind a closed border.
Or it could conceivably have been taken in Flensburg, in the north of Germany, close to the Danish border, where Mischka and Olga met up in the spring of 1945 after making their separate ways across Germany in the months before its final capitulation and, in Mischka’s case, surviving both the Allied bombing of Dresden and a bout of diphtheria en route. I doubt this, however: Olga looks too spruce for a refugee and Mischka too healthy for someone still recovering from a serious illness. It was in Flensburg that the two of them officially became DPs, under the care of UNRRA (the United National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the British occupation forces.
What the picture captures beautifully, whenever it was taken, is the relationship between the two. Olga leans towards him, straightforwardly warm and affectionate and engaged, and Mischka accepts her affection, even returns it, but preserves his independence by looking slightly away. This is exactly how they were in the letters they exchanged regularly over the years of their residence in Germany, 1944–51. Fortunately for us, they were generally not living in the same city. For much of 1944, the correspondence was between Mischka in Dresden and Olga in Riga and then various towns in the Sudetenland. Then, after some months together in Flensburg, Mischka moved to Hanover to study at the technical university there. Olga, by now developing a career as a sculptor as well as running a tailoring business, moved to Fulda in the American zone in 1947. She was still there two years later when Mischka went to Heidelberg, also in the American zone, to do his PhD in physics, marrying Helga, whom he had met in the Hanover sports club shortly before the move. The correspondence turns international at the end of 1950, when Olga emigrated to the United States, sponsored by one of the Jews she had protected back in Riga during the German occupation. It ends when Mischka and Helga arrived in New York as immigrants a year later and were reunited with Olga.
All this time, Olga was writing warm, chatty, practical, informative letters about what she was doing, in her rather untidy handwriting and with quite a few mistakes in the German, while Mischka responded in better German and more legible handwriting, giving Olga his thoughts on physics, philosophy and (when he was having girlfriend trouble) relations between the sexes, but rarely condescending, despite her repeated requests, to give her the mundane details about his everyday and student life that she, sometimes with a certain asperity, requested. That parsimoniousness with information, along with a teasing tendency to obfuscation (‘Which Baltic state?’ ‘The middle one’) was as recognisable to me as his handwriting, which hadn’t changed in forty years.
When the correspondence starts, Olga writes as a parent— caring but also authoritative, generous with advice and sometimes admonition. As it develops, she yields some authority to Mischka and even starts to defer to him on business and organisational questions. This undoubtedly reflects the fact that he was growing up, but also suggests that the canny Olga was encouraging him to do so, even tutoring him in the new role. The depth of Olga’s affection is evident in her letters; the depth of Mischka’s perhaps only from his diary. But as Olga once wrote to him, it didn’t matter whether he expressed his affection openly or not because she could always decode him. For the six or seven years they were in Germany, each was for the other the closest and most important person in the world. That’s why a book that was meant to be just about Mischka ended up as a book about Mischka and Olga.
1
Family
Olga and Arpad Danos around the time of their marriage, 1920.
NOSTALGIA for the home we once slammed the door on often creeps up on expatriates. But not on Misha. Uniquely, in my experience, he held firm to his original conviction that the place he had grown up in was a provincial backwater that he had been right to leave at the earliest possible moment. His two brothers had stayed in Riga, though not exactly by choice. In the 1990s, when Latvia emerged from the Soviet Union and opened up again, Misha resisted, for as long as he could, his brother Jan’s urgent invitations to visit Riga, then yielded unwillingly, and squirmed all the time he was there. He and I had both, as teenagers, longed
to leave the parochial, narrow-minded, intolerant place that we had, by some cosmic mistake, been born in and get out into the real world. But my feelings about Australia had mellowed over the years, while rational Misha had seen no reason to change his attitude. Or perhaps it wasn’t the rational Misha who held so strongly to this position: the Riga past was a bit of an emotional minefield for him. He cherished the memory of Olga and his elder brother Arpad, a sometime prisoner of Gulag of whom Misha spoke almost with reverence. But Olga had ended up, like him, in America; and it was the remembered Arpad that he felt close to, not the still-living one, long back in Riga but permanently damaged by his Soviet experiences. The only thing in Riga to which Misha had a straightforward ‘this is my own, my native land’ response was Rigās Jūrmala, the beloved beach resort of his childhood. I found it on the bleak side.
Misha had a strong sense of himself as a European. But he was skittish about nationality, refusing even to commit himself to a native language (he said German, Latvian and Russian were all spoken in his milieu, and resisted my suggestion that German seemed to be his native language, since his German was much better than his Russian or, as far as I could tell, his Latvian). This was one of the few contexts in which his father, the multilingual cosmopolitan, was cited with unreserved approval, particularly for his dismissive attitude to things Latvian. Misha never expressed any particular feeling of kinship with Latvians, whose interwar (and, in the displaced persons camps, postwar) nationalism had left unpleasant memories. He displayed marginally more interest in Hungarians, of whom there were many in his chosen community of physics, though I couldn’t say it went as far as a feeling of kinship (skill at entering revolving doors behind you and exiting in front was emphasised, and Misha did not have that skill). Still, I thought he might be interested in going to Hungary, since we travelled a lot in Europe, and given the Hungarian father, but he wasn’t at all. Quite the contrary. We never went there, which given my professional ties with Eastern Europe, almost amounted to a statement.
Of the stories Misha told me about his childhood, the one I remember most vividly was about his expulsion from the Riga German classical gymnasium (academic high school), for rudeness to a teacher, which he considered outrageous since all he had been doing was non-disruptively pointing out that the man didn’t know what he was talking about. Even sixty years later, he didn’t really see why the teacher had been so annoyed; unlike the rest of us as we get older, he had not become persuaded that seniority deserves respect. When he started to write his musings for me, not much about his childhood or family background struck him as significant enough to be remembered. There was a memory, from the family’s prosperous days in the early 1920s, of going upstairs to the kitchen to the warm, comfortable presence of the servants, who though welcoming, conveyed some sense that he wasn’t supposed to be there. After a while, he worked out that this must be his mother’s edict, based on the principle of non-fraternisation between classes, which opened up a small crack in his previously wholesale acceptance of his mother’s wisdom. But that, from Misha, was not a story about the beginning of class consciousness. His dislike of separation into hierarchical categories in which some were held to be inferior extended in practice not only to age (he had no special way of treating either five- or 95-year-olds) but even to species (he treated dogs as not clearly distinct from humans, and in return they seemed to treat him as not clearly distinct from a dog).
Another memory was of his strong internal protest against the indignity of having to get rotten apples from the market because they were cheap—a consequence of the family’s financial crisis in the early 1930s. It was a memory of humiliation stemming from a sense of pride, and thus potentially contradictory to the anti-distinction position I have just outlined. But Misha would have said that the pride that was damaged by the rotten apples was his pride as an individual, unique and unrepeatable, not his pride as the member of a family that had formerly been prosperous but was now poor. In any case, it was a story implicitly critical of his father (who argued that rotten apples were only rotten in parts and remained basically eatable) and supportive of his mother, who evidently thought that the family’s plight did not justify quite such extreme measures. That, as he was growing up and the parents were quarrelling, was Misha’s usual choice of allegiance.
The one musing he wrote on family history, entitled ‘Stories from the Grandfather’s Times’, concerned his mother’s Latvian father, not the essentially unknown Hungarian (or Jewish) grandfather on the paternal side. There was a reason for Misha’s interest in the Latvian grandfather that we will come to later. But the substance of the musing is notable for its scrupulous attention to detail, especially geographic, economic and technological. As I read it, I am irresistibly reminded of going for walks with Misha along the C&O Canal near our house in Washington. The canal runs beside the Potomac River. As we walked, Misha would be registering water levels, landscape contours, vegetation, and wildlife in and out of the water, and at the same time carefully examining any machine or construction along the way to determine its purpose and operational principles. I saw virtually none of these things, not only because I am short-sighted but also because I don’t pay attention. The only things that would strike me on the towpath were the people we passed, from whose dress, facial expression, demeanour and behaviour to each other I would make some quick, automatic deductions about character, social status, relationship to each other and so on. But Misha didn’t even notice them.
‘The grandmother, Julia, was born 1870’ is how ‘Stories from the Grandfather’s Times’ starts. But we hear no more of Julia, though she lived in the Danos household for most of Misha’s childhood, something of a kill-joy presence as far as I could gather from Misha’s rare remarks about her. As the musing continues,
the grandfather, Janis Viksne, was a little, not much, older; probably born 1865, i.e., after, even though not much after, the removal of serfdom. Thus, a few, very few, serfdom stories survived, but only from Julia’s side … My mother was born in 1897, into a household, an economic enterprise, based on a water mill, with a dam across the Jugla river, a tributary to the Jugla lake (Stintsee in German), not far from Riga. In German it would be called ‘ein Bach’, not ‘ein Fluss’. I have not seen that place; my mother visited it: nothing had survived WWI, not even the dam. At any rate, the power generated by that water wheel was sufficient to power not only a wood-working shop, but even an electric generator, supplying electric lights to the Viksne population. That aspect was a thorn in the side of the local German baron—the ex-serfholder of that region: ‘This Viksne, he has electricity and I do not!’ Actually, that was the first electricity in the district, if not the Baltics; I think his electricity certainly predates the electrification of Riga; probably not that of some of Riga’s industries.
The electricity motif had some personal significance for Misha because of his work as a young man at the VEF, Riga’s great electrotechnical factory. But it had significance in the history of Latvia as well, because Riga in the decades before the First World War was one of the Russian Empire’s economic showpieces. Large, modern industrial plants, many of them foreign-owned, had sprung up in the latter part of the nineteenth century, metalworking, mechanical engineering and chemicals being the biggest industries. In the decade before the First World War, Latvia’s annual growth rate was a spectacular 6.4 per cent, while Riga’s population doubled. Misha’s grandfather was a beneficiary, since he had set up a woodworking shop at his mill that made stopcocks (external valves regulating the flow of liquid) for beer kegs, and Riga’s breweries constituted a flourishing market.
Latvia is a small country wedged between two big ones, Germany and Russia, whose periodic incursions provided many of the great events of its history. Up to the First World War, it was a part of the Russian Empire, having been won from the Swedes by Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For a century before, it had been a site of contestation between the Teutonic Knights, the Polish-Lithuani
an Commonwealth, Sweden and Russia. Before that, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, Riga had been an important town in the Hanseatic League, connecting it with the German language, culture and trading network.
Since the Reformation, the majority of the population of present-day Latvia identified as Lutheran by confession, although the eastern region of Latgale remained Roman Catholic, and Orthodoxy made inroads in the Russian period. The German presence remained large, with German nobles— the so-called ‘Baltic barons’—the main landowners. Their serfs, mainly ethnic Latvians, were for the most part emancipated in the early nineteenth century, but resentment against the Baltic barons remained. Russification policies of the 1880–90s aimed to reduce the German dominance, including linguistically, but in the short term their effect was mainly to sharpen Latvian resentment against Russians as well as Germans.
Latvia’s population grew rapidly in the course of the nineteenth century, from a base of 720,000 to two million, with large-scale and varied immigration, which reduced the ethnic Latvian proportion of the population from 90 per cent at the beginning of the century to 68 per cent at the end. The biggest minorities at the turn of the century were Russians (8 per cent), Germans (7 per cent) and Jews (6 per cent)—the figures, from Latvian sources, may err on the low side—and in Riga both German and Russian were officially recognised languages. In culture, German remained the dominant influence: it wasn’t only ethnic Germans who spoke German at home and sent their children to German schools, but also many others.