by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
Listen, don’t disappoint us with the high spirits of the all-too-gifted man [shades of her critique of his father, with his wasted talents!]. Protect your gifts; that means, work hard, because they are not only your property. Nature gives out gifts sparingly, and he who has many of them has to use them to help his fellow men …
Going to study in Germany certainly let Mischka see a lot of the Central European world. A diary entry in the spring of 1945 summarises his travels over the previous year: ‘Vienna-Prague-Berlin-Vienna-Berlin-Dresden-Vienna-Dresden-Vienna-Dresden-Riga-Vienna-Dresden’. Vienna, evidently, was the base; he stayed there with Frau Loefer and her husband, probably acquaintances of his parents, and gave that as his permanent address. Mischka was very taken with Vienna—‘it is already high spring, the plum and peach and apple trees are in bloom’—and he liked the Loefers. By 4 May, he had joined the Foreign Student Club in Vienna—identifying himself as Michael (not Latvian Mikelis) Danos, citizen of Latvia, nationality Hungarian, native language German—and made some sporting connections.
But his university placement had yet to be confirmed, and the first problem was that this had to be done in Berlin. Off he went to Berlin, and there made contact with Dr Hans Boening, one of Olga’s German patrons, who informed him that the relevant official—an important ‘Herr Professor’, too busy to see Mischka—wanted to send him to one of the technical universities at Stuttgart or Dresden, though Mischka was evidently hoping for Vienna. Now, as he informed his family, he was unfortunately out of money but had several ‘support points’ in the Reich: a very good one in Vienna, a good one in Berlin (a widowed landlady with a daughter—her son had died at Stalingrad), and even, in case of need, one in Prague, where he had had to make a stopover en route to Berlin. ‘For the rest,’ he concluded grandly, ‘I have as little respect as ever for difficulties. Moreover I have a new motto for myself: KL [kompromisslosigkeit, ‘uncompromisingness’].
Mischka’s Berlin trips had put him back in touch with friends from Riga days: first Valka (who now becomes a German Walka or even Waldtraut) Herrnberger and then, through her, both Baby Klumberg, recently arrived and rooming in the same house, and Baby’s brother Didi. Baby was working as a secretary, perhaps in the home office of the German firm she had worked for in Riga. Didi, who had just graduated from the Dresden Technical University, at which Mischka was about to enrol, was serving as a radio operator in the Wehrmacht, stationed not far from Berlin.
Walka, working in an office in Berlin, seems to have been in an unhappy frame of mind. She fastened on Mischka as soon as he arrived in Berlin, sending him in the next couple of months a dozen letters about her depression and loneliness and the ‘beautiful and carefree hours’ they spent together when she visited him in Dresden in the summer. Even though Mischka evidently kept his distance (Walka complained about this), I rather took against Walka, with her dreams of lying in a white bed in a hospital being looked after and her tendency to whine, but perhaps this was just because she was so clearly on the hunt for Mischka.
And there was another reason: a document that looks to be in Walka’s handwriting on a half sheet of paper, headed Verpflichtung (‘Undertaking’), dated Berlin 13 May 1944 (the same date on which Mischka wrote his first letter home, giving his address as ‘temporarily Berlin’). The document reads, ‘I, Waldtraut Herrnberger, born 22 October 1919 in Riga, undertake in the course of two weeks after my divorce from Mr Michael Danos to leave him without claims to alimony from your (sic) divorce.’ Naturally, as a subsequent wife of Mischka’s, this got my attention. It was hard to imagine Mischka up and marrying Walka within days of his arrival in Berlin, having had no apparent contact with her for the past four years, and at the same time writing so cheerfully to his family about his progress (he mentioned her in a letter home as ‘Frau W. Herrnberger [whom] you will remember’, who had helped him find his Berlin lodgings). Yet there it was, one of the few apparently unambiguous and completely legible papers in my Danos files; surely it must mean something.
But it’s one of the infuriating things about personal documentation that really valuable stuff disappears and meaningless things—jokes, party games or whatever—get accidentally kept. I had to conclude that Walka’s Verpflichtung was in that category, even if Walka was not being altogether frank about her relations with Mischka when I asked her about it. When I showed it to Helen Machen (the former Baby Klumberg), she was astonished: Walka had her own boyfriend, she said, an older German gentleman with two PhDs, and she never knew of any romantic attachment, let alone a marriage and divorce, between her and Mischka. Helen was sufficiently intrigued to pick up the telephone and call Mrs Wally Ayers, formerly Walka, in Canada and ask her about it. But Walka denied all knowledge of the document, suggesting that someone else might have written it pretending to be her, and also disclaimed any romantic connection with Mischka: he was a nice man, quiet and almost shy, respectful of women, but she didn’t know him well. Anyway, she didn’t want to talk about those miserable times; it was better to forget the past.
By the time Walka’s letters started coming, Mischka was already in Dresden. That was where he was assigned as a student by the Reich Education Ministry, initially for one semester only, with a new application to be made before the beginning of the winter semester of 1944–45.
Mischka struck it lucky in Dresden. Four of his courses that first summer semester were with Professor Heinrich Barkhausen, a physicist who held the first chair in electrical engineering at Dresden Technische Hochschule (TH) and founded the Institute of High-Frequency Electron-Tube Technology there. Barkhausen was in his sixties when he encountered Mischka, no doubt with his major work behind him, but still active and engaged. All his life, Misha spoke with the greatest respect of Barkhausen. He was the first of his physics mentors as an adult, and although it was Misha’s habit to deny that he ever learnt anything from anyone, he did admit that Barkhausen had made a contribution. (What he attributed to Barkhausen was the reassurance that it was OK in physics to see things in pictures, thus ‘legalising’ a habit Mischka had kept quiet about.)
It didn’t take Barkhausen long to see that he, too, had struck it lucky with Mischka. Mischka’s letters home in those first months are full of the excitement of having his talents recognised and seeing vistas of science opening up before him. He wrote on 21 July 1944:
I have already made a good impression on one of my professors. It happened like this. Barkhausen always comes to the Low Voltage practicum and talks to the people working there. I as a so-called beginner got the simplest task to do at the beginning. I was working with a young man from Riga, and the work was going very quickly. Officially, one had 4 hours to complete it, but we only needed 1 hour. In that time the Herr Professor was walking round and talking to people, and he came to us as well. Since that occasion he comes to us every time. We are gradually getting ever more difficult assignments, and he has separated me from my partner and put me with someone else. As it happens, this new partner is in his last semester and is doing the most advanced experiments. Thus, to sum up, after 6 weeks he [Barkhausen] has given me the same assignments that you get after two and a half semesters.
A week later, he was able to report that he had been appointed as a junior assistant to Barkhausen—not a teaching position, he explained, but a technical one, with the task of upgrading the Low Voltage practicum. ‘As a job it’s not worth anything much,’ he wrote to Olga, ‘but rather as a principal step in the direction of the future and reputation.’ Olga was as usual warmly appreciative: ‘Dear Mischulein,’ she replied, ‘you can imagine what joy the news of your success has brought us. Arpad has told some friends about it. Some were pleased but some were also envious. As always.’ This is the first indication in Mischka’s papers of him thinking in terms of making a career (something to which he would generally be disinclined all his life). Before, he had simply been fascinated by physical processes as such, both in a practical and theoretical way. Barkhausen quickly took on the role of patron. In a l
etter recommending extension of his stipend, dated 17 August 1944, he wrote that ‘Mr Danos is well known to me from the Low Voltage practicum. He is particularly gifted theoretically and also possesses excellent practical knowledge, so that I have appointed him Junior Assistant during the vacation.’ A To-Whom-It-May-Concern letter a few months later stated that ‘Mr Michael Danos is occupied in important, necessary work in the Institute for Low Power Technology. It is requested that he be supported in carrying out his work.’
In the semester break in September, Mischka wrote to his mother: ‘We have vacation at the moment, and must do war work (Kriegseinsatz) for a while. “We” means foreigners who are citizens of various small nations. I personally don’t feel any difference, as my work for Barkhausen counts as war work.’
He was thinking a lot about physics—he had had ‘ideas of both a general and technical nature’, as he wrote to his mother, ‘and am working out some of them, and have come to the astonishing realisation that despite everything I am still making progress’. On 16 June, a large part of his letter to Olga was devoted to thoughts on mathematical relativity, by analogy with relativity in modern physics, and a critique of mathematical absolutism. He admitted that such thoughts might ‘lead to the madhouse’, a sentiment that Olga seemed to share, though acknowledging that she hadn’t understood half of what he wrote. Then, in a letter that also asked Olga to send darning wool, he explored, at length, the concept of logic, which he regarded as not innate but based on activated memory—something that, if the philosophers realised it, would send them to the madhouse, ‘seeing the unfruitfulness of their lives’. Logic, he now understood, was just one of the ‘humanly generated systems for the consistent ordering of observed phenomena’, but people hated to admit this. ‘I don’t know if anyone has had the courage to say this, because it would destroy the nimbus of absolute truth.’ And there was more of the critique of logic in a letter of 3 September, with Mischka rising effortlessly above the mundane issues of Latvia’s Soviet reoccupation, Olga’s departure and the failed efforts of his two brothers to get out.
‘Your egocentric son Michael’ was how he signed one of these philosophical letters, and Olga, proud though she was of him, must surely have agreed. Of course, up until Olga’s departure at the beginning of October, these were letters that were bound to be passed on to the rest of the family, with the two Arpads, father and son, more philosophically and scientifically inclined than Olga. Perhaps it was even, in part, Mischka’s way of keeping up the connection with his father, which, thanks to external as well as domestic developments, was becoming ever more tenuous. In December (with the Soviets firmly in control in Latvia, and the two Arpads and Jan trapped inside), Mischka ended a paragraph on how solving scientific problems is easier than finding the right problems to solve with a sudden, almost wistful reference to his father: ‘By the way, I heard this thesis once from Papa in Elisabetes Street, but naturally rejected it out of contrariness. But this thing gave me no peace, and soon I had to recognise its correctness, but of course I haven’t spoken of it again.’ He was thinking about his father again in a diary entry a few months later, noting that there was something he had to think about more deeply: ‘the appreciation and more correct understanding of life’s tragedy and the problem and achievements of my father’.
Sport was another prominent topic of Mischka’s letters to Olga, sometimes with explicit requests to pass something on to his brother and fellow athlete Arpad. Even in his brief stay in Vienna, Mischka had established sporting contacts, as he noted in a letter of 13 May, although ‘unfortunately they will probably remain unused’. A long letter of 16 June combined information about his efforts to get into the sporting scene in Dresden with a critical assessment of Germans. My assumption is that this curious mix, which makes the letter uncharacteristically unfocussed and wandering, was partly an intentional camouflage for the politically dangerous suggestion that politics and propaganda were playing too large a role in German universities and that Germans seemed ‘apathetic and passive’, without enthusiasm or initiative. At the same time, it comes through clearly that Mischka was very annoyed by the local sports bureaucracy, which tried first to prevent him, as a foreigner, from participating in Dresden’s regional sports meet, and then to disqualify him from officially winning or placing in the events. They hadn’t bothered to get the formalities taken care of, despite the fact that Mischka had carefully explained to them what they needed to do. On top of that, they had only managed to produce an inadequate pole for his pole vaulting, although he was sure they had a better one. By the end of the letter, he moves out of the realm of political commentary and into straightforward reporting of sporting prowess:
Could you tell Arpad that I have begun my season with 12.0? [It’s not clear what competition this is—perhaps triple jump?] And something else. The day before yesterday for the first time this year I did some pole vaulting … And despite the lack of technical training and the inferior pole, I got the training height up to 3.35. [So despite everything] it’s working! Even with primitive means! And not at all badly.
There is no more political comment in the letters or diary of this period, but that is not to say that Mischka was completely oblivious to the darker side of German life. This is evident in his reaction to a casual meeting with a German nurse, which he wrote about in a musing fifty years later:
Late summer or early fall 1944, downtown Dresden. The weather was pleasant, relaxed, the sidewalks were full; it must have been Sunday afternoon. I do not remember how, but I struck up a conversation with a perhaps 25 year old, non-uniformed girl, pleasant looking, but evidently alone, not having anything particularly in mind. Looked as if not from Dresden; even somewhat lost. That may have been the reason I took up the conversation. Very quickly I ascertained that she indeed is non-local; on vacation from somewhere in the South of Germany; possibly from [somewhere] not far from Munich … I found her a very pleasant, warm personality; but evidently troubled. I, of course, began to ask questions. She is a hospital nurse; under heavy stress. Hence was sent away to relax, recuperate, away from her place of residence, away from colleagues, environment. She did not answer any more detailed questions; she intimated that her job was secret. It did not take much of contemplation to reach the conclusion that she was involved in medical experimentation in a concentration camp.
It turned out to be the last day of her vacation, and she had to leave early the next morning. At his suggestion, they had a pleasant dinner together (‘having lots of ration cards, she felt free to accept’). As they left the restaurant, she suddenly became ill, and then almost immediately left: ‘Auf Wiedersehen (the meaningless breaking off; can mean see you tomorrow, or, see you never). I was not happy to see her go.’ He struggled afterwards with the contradiction of a nice, seemingly kind girl who had apparently been drawn into something horrible and inhuman:
I had no difficulty in reconstructing her path: having the caring personality, she chose the most helpful profession: hospital nurse. Having graduated, she was recruited into a job which, being secret, she did not know anything about. But, it being war, there were all kind of secret places, activities, around: ‘Vorsicht, Feind höhrt mit!’[‘Careful, the enemy is listening!’] She must have been told that it is a very important job, that it is so important that one can not talk about it. Once in it, there was no way out. The aspect which impressed me so strongly, then, and still now, was the discrepancy between her caring person, her aims, dreams of helpfulness, and the reality she found herself in.
‘No wonder she had the breakdown,’ he concluded sadly. ‘I do not think she made it through denazification.’
This was a rare direct contact with what Misha later called the totalitarian side of German life. Normal life, as he encountered it lodging with ordinary working-class families in Dresden and elsewhere, seems to have been remarkably free of police-state or even wartime pressures. He observed ‘no fear of the Gestapo’ or any kind of surveillance:
There existed
a neighborhood Party member (Blockwart if my memory is correct) who was invisible, whose existence was totally ignored. Was Blockwart an informer? Perhaps, but who cares. The local people talked freely to me, a foreigner. Having had no bombings, Dresden was at peace; in contrast Riga was at war. Even though being an eminently draftable specimen I was never asked to produce personal documents, except when travelling on the fast non-stop long-distance trains (D-Zug or Fern-D-Zug), not even on long-distance ‘local’ trains (Bummelzug), which stop at all intermediate stations … The police state, the totalitarianism, did not concern the population. It only concerned the ‘other’, who were essentially invisible (forced labourers from the East; POWs) … In interpersonal relations, both concerning civil and criminal cases, the state functioned as always; there was no need to use subterfuge, and perhaps even very little chance of success. No lawlessness in the society. Law and order prevailed.
This last assertion was not just a general observation but based on actual research—one of Mischka’s landladies, the widow of a lawyer, put transcripts of Third Reich court cases in the lavatory as toilet paper, and evidently it was Mischka’s habit to read them before use. (This detail of everyday life reminded me how in Moscow in the 1960s, Pravda was often used for the same purpose, and I used to read it that way too.)
Mischka’s student status was extended for two more semesters by the education minister in December. That was a weight off his mind, as it guaranteed his stipend. In addition to his school studies, he had started to read the German physics journal Zeitschrift für Physik, which was to acquire almost talismanic significance for him as he lugged his copies—twenty volumes!—around in the coming years of displacement. Nevertheless, he was back to his old tricks of missing lectures, informing Olga that he hadn’t been to a single one this semester (it’s to be hoped that the two courses he was doing with Barkhausen listed on his transcript were not lecture courses).