by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
One rather dubious achievement of this period is not overtly discussed in Mischka’s and Olga’s correspondence— namely, an invention of his that was praised by the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production. We know about it only because a letter dated 15 December 1944 survives from a Colonel Geist in the ministry to Dr H. Boening, President of the District Work Office, Reichenburg, the patron of Olga’s who had helped Mischka set up his German studies in Berlin:
Subject: The invention proposal of Mischka Danos In reference to: Communication of 16 October 1944
Very respected Mr President!
The communication from Herr Dr Schmelter along with the exposition of the discovery of student Mischka Danos was forwarded to me for consideration.
It concerns an acoustic pathfinding apparatus [Zielsuchgerät] … Since Danos correctly sees the electro-acoustic problem with his assessment of the applicability limits, I have sent his model for testing to the special commission ‘Munition Accessories’ to Herr Dr Runge in the development high commission ‘Elektrotechnik’, with the request that they make direct contact with the inventor.
I beg to thank your protégé for his trouble and the great interest he shows for the defence of the German Reich.
Heil Hitler!
I know nothing of the outcome (no evidence of ‘direct contact’ is to be found in the files), but clearly if Mischka had anything to do with the submission of his invention, it contradicts his later claim to have systematically sought not to help the German war effort. My hypothesis—of course, the reader might suspect I would say this—is that Mischka himself did not submit his invention to the ministry, but that it was done on the initiative of Barkhausen or whoever Dr Schmelter was, to whom he had showed it. Mischka now called himself Michael Danos in all official interactions, though German friends called him Mischka. The inventor in this document is identified, rather patronisingly, as ‘the student Mischka Danos’, a self-description Mischka would never have used in such a context. But all this is speculation. The only further light to be shed on the topic—and it may not in fact be about Mischka Danos’s commendation by the Reich—is in a carefully worded sentence in one of Olga’s letters a month later to the effect that she would rather not comment on some recent excitement or perturbation he had written about because they would soon be able to discuss it face to face.
Certainly there is no other indication that Mischka was interested in contributing to the defence of the Reich. His reaction to the suggestion that his younger brother Jan wanted to join the Latvian Legion—that is, the Latvian units of the Waffen-SS—was sharply negative. Olga had written to tell Mischka that ‘Janschi was set on joining the Legion. He explained to me at great length that the eternal hiding is suffocating him and he will end up weak and without will. In the Legion he would find a broad and specialised development field.’ Jan had actually gone to the induction commission to sign up, Olga wrote, but they put off accepting him for a month on health grounds (he still showed traces of the pleurisy he had contracted in prison). While Olga’s telling of the story only implied disapproval, Mischka’s response—written within three days of receiving Olga’s letter, a very quick turnaround for him—was choleric:
I read with great astonishment, and then not with astonishment, of Jochen’s decision. [Note the distancing use of the full German version of Jan’s name.] In case he goes through with it, I would like to wish that he brings the necessary amount of commonsense—which actually is not so great— to bear, so as to hold out tolerable prospects for any future mutual life, which hopefully and probably will not suddenly be put at risk. As I said, hold out! And I also want my good wishes to be understood in this sense.
This I take to mean that if Jan joined up, his future relations with Mischka would be in jeopardy—expressed, for the sake of prudence in light of the postal censorship, in extraordinarily complex syntax and with maximum circumlocution.
In the event, Jan didn’t join up. There was scarcely time, as the Soviets were at the gates and the Germans in retreat from the Baltics within weeks. Perhaps Jan’s intention of joining the Legion—at such a late stage, and after evading call-up for so long—actually covered a hope of leaving Latvia for the West under military protection. The Soviet Army’s attack on the Baltic states had actually begun in the summer of 1944, the immediate target being Lithuania but with some incursion into Latvian territory. By early August, Soviet forces were in occupation of the Latvian province of Latgallia, and by mid September they had pushed into northern Latvia. Riga was reoccupied without a struggle on 13 October.
‘We’re all looking in the direction of the West,’ Olga wrote to Mischka on 20 May. Jan was at that point still in the hospital, but almost recovered. As for Arpad Jr, Olga seems to have had an earlier plan to get him sent to Vienna to study, which would have been difficult as he was not a university student and may not even have graduated from high school. Now she was focussed on getting him to Germany as a ‘specialist’, but nothing came of this either, though she wrote to Mischka in July that ‘I hope soon, together with Arpad, to see you.’ Only Arpad Sr, in poor health and close to sixty, had no plans to leave.
It was a very confused situation, with plans constantly being adjusted. In June and again in July, there are references in Mischka’s correspondence to a possible trip home to Riga, and at some point that summer he evidently did get back to Riga, judging by his diary summary of his travels. But it must have been a short visit that left no other traces.
Olga’s plan was to leave legally, on the pretext of moving her business to German-occupied Czechoslovakia. On 25 June, she wrote that she had to go to Prague, ‘since I have a new order from the Wehrmacht (50,000 pairs), and for that I need quite different metal fittings than for the regular police’. Three weeks later, she had dispatched a consignment of her own things, including her private papers, to Mischka in Dresden via rail freight, clearly part of a permanent departure plan. But there were difficulties: her health was giving way and her usual decisiveness was crumbling. Nerve pains in her legs were mentioned in a letter in May, and in June she wrote that she was trying to make plans for Arpad Jr, but ‘everything is ruined by my immobility’. ‘I don’t know how I’ll be able to make the final trip,’ she wrote in July; she still wasn’t feeling well, despite ‘going for electric treatments five days in a row … I’m in a very bad mood, dreamy, disabled. I should long ago have got over these moods … Letting the soul wander in dreams doesn’t make it stronger but transparent and friable, like the finest glass.’ The letter ended on a note of appeal, with Olga invoking a childhood nickname: ‘My dear Mauserl, write to me. Your Mama’.
It was a break in Olga’s life with multiple significance. Not only was she preparing to leave home, but she had also separated from her husband definitively (or as definitively as she ever did) and was living alone in her workshop. Her married life, she reflected, had always been like a rocking horse, one partner up and the other down at any given time. ‘Now it is my poor old husband who is begging for love and suffers.’ But they were both unhappy, and they weren’t going to grow old together. At the beginning of May, she made up her mind to take the final plunge and went to a lawyer to file for divorce. He wasn’t home, however, and she resolved to go back in the morning—adding the rather ambiguous qualification ‘If I should think differently about it in the morning, I would have to have changed a great deal.’ She was trying without much success to convince herself that her personal unhappiness was a triviality in light of the world catastrophe in progress. Whether or not she actually got a divorce, or even filed for it, nobody in the family seems to know. My hunch is that she didn’t. The last entry of her diary written in Riga is ‘I am so sorry for my old husband. My husband, whom I loved so much and in such a complicated way.’
As of 13 August, with the Russians getting ever closer, they were all still in Riga, as Mischka’s brother Arpad wrote to him: ‘Mama will soon go to you in Dresden. We will go too. Whether it is to Dresden or somewher
e else, we don’t yet know exactly. For now we are still sitting in Riga …’ On 28 August, Olga wrote to Mischka from Riga that ‘we have lived through a few exciting days here. But the big blows of events have temporarily fallen elsewhere, and so now we are again living calmly.’ However, it was clearly time to get out before Soviet forces took Riga and the way was blocked.
Olga left on 1 October, a legal departure on a business trip. Her husband wrote a cautiously phrased letter to her with that date, signing himself ‘The Old Man’:
Dear Olga,
I came breathlessly to the steamer, you had telephoned that you were coming. I waited … [sic] and was able to watch from the bank as the ship slowly pulled out. Then I went up and found on the table my torture photo. Perhaps it was an oversight, perhaps ballast or forgetfulness, chi lo sara [who knows] … Anyway I am sending you my ugly mug as a present.
I got a couple of optimistic lines from A. [Arpad Jr]. I hope he handles himself properly …
Perhaps we will see each other again under the ‘hold fast’ motto.
How strange that expression seems in the midst of this world chaos.
In line with our external environment I have developed something like rheumatism or neuralgia of the joints, so that from now on I can only (illegible—hobble?) rhythmically through life.
Until you come back to your country I will try to hold things together as much as possible, twiddle with the radio knobs, and ‘read good books’.
Did you, poor life-wounded wife, get your clutch of young ones off?
Farewell, and to Mischi.
The Old Man.
I wonder if Olga showed Mischka this letter, with its absence of any final message to him. It looks as if the resentment was not all on Mischka’s side. The expression ‘life-wounded wife’ (Lebensinvalidenfrau) touched Olga, and she would later quote it at the end of the diary of her marriage. ‘Getting your clutch of young ones off’, as Jan explained to me, meant getting him and Arpad off to Courland en route to an illegal departure by boat to Sweden. That was the plan, masterminded by Olga, and years later she was still reproaching herself for having left them to carry it out without her. But at the time of her departure, she thought it was going to come off. In a stop in Gotenhafen (Gdansk) during her journey, she remembered sitting on a hill looking at the sea below and ‘trying in the distance to discern the Swedish coast, where I thought both the young ones were’.
What happened, according to Jan’s later account, was that the plan fell through because of Arpad Jr’s thoughtless generosity. Jan and his new wife Balva were in hiding in Courland, on the western coast of Latvia, and the arrangement was that the forester with whom they were living would provide a boat to take the two of them plus Arpad to Sweden. This was supposed to happen on or around 1 October. Arpad duly arrived from Riga, but with four other people, which was too many for the boat. As a result, none of them left. Two weeks later, the Soviets reoccupied Riga and quickly closed the borders. This effort was the end of Jan’s attempts to get out; he stayed in Riga and lived a long Soviet and post-Soviet life there. Arpad Jr made one more attempt, on ‘the first day of peace’ (presumably May 1945). Again, it was a ship to Sweden, but it never sailed because the Soviets came in and took everyone off. The crew were arrested but the would-be passengers were released and sent home—except for Arpad, who, out of goodheartedness, had been helping the crew load coal and was therefore taken for a crew member. He was arrested and ended up in Vorkuta in the Soviet Gulag, returning to Riga in damaged health three years later.
By 2 October, Olga was already in Reichenberg in the Sudetenland (part of the wartime Reich). This was her official business destination: she was supposed to be moving her workshop to the region, evidently with the help of her protector Dr Boening, who had an official position there. Reichenberg (now known by its Czech name of Liberec) was already within striking distance of Dresden, just 138 kilometres away on the other side of the Czech-German border, or four hours in the train via Prague. When she wrote to Mischka on 2 October, she said she was planning to go to Prague for medical treatment.
On 14 October, she was writing (again from Reichenberg) with some irritation at Mischka’s not having written, asking why he didn’t come there and whether her luggage had arrived or if he had received a letter from Papa for her. If Mischka could come to Reichenburg, Olga wrote, would he bring her dresses, and also the suitcase and her old diary (presumably the very one I now have), which was hidden under his mattress. One of her Riga workers, Nina Berners, had also arrived, bringing news of Arpad and Jan in Courland. Hidden in the middle of the letter were two heavy sentences: ‘Today came the news on the radio that Riga has fallen. Thus we are now homeless. I want to hope very much that the young ones will struggle through.’
There is a break in the surviving correspondence for a month, perhaps because letters were not preserved or because the two had been meeting in the Sudetenland or Dresden. Olga and her ‘crew’ had barely set up shop when they were evacuated to another Sudetenland town, Tetschen-Bodenbach (now Děčín, on the Elbe, just inside the Czech border with Germany), and Misha later remembered making ‘frequent weekend trips’ from Dresden, despite the fact that the railway—the main line from Berlin to Prague—was often bombed and out of commission, making the trip much longer. Naturally there were bureaucratic complications connected with moving the business. ‘My workshop is still not ready,’ Olga wrote on 18 November. She had applied for her new licence, but Reichenberg and the neighbouring centre of Aussig [now Usti nad Laben] were disputing about responsibility. As a result, Olga was constantly shuttling back and forth: ‘I came in [to Reichenberg] on the slow train at 2 am. Next week I will go to Prague. This week I was in Aussig twice. I think a train conductor is not on the road more than I am.’
In the winter vacation of 1944–45, Mischka took off on a tourist trip, which he described to his mother as ‘positive in the highest degree’. This is one of the small surprises of research, to find that in the middle of the war, just months before the Soviet Army crossed the German border, Mischka was calmly taking a holiday. He went to Munich, Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Innsbruck, fell in love with the mountains and found people in the south much nicer. On the way back, he swung through Vienna, called in on the Loefers and probably parked a suitcase with them. Leaving suitcases, and then later collecting them, is one of the leitmotifs of the Danoses’ wartime experience—and not only theirs. When you have lost most things, it’s very important where you left the rest; these are places where you have planted a small part of yourself, places that could be, or could have been, a home. Marlene Dietrich has immortalised this in her haunting song of the early 1950s, ‘Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin’ (‘I still have a suitcase in Berlin’).
The Munich-Innsbruck trip was the end of Mischka’s (comparatively) carefree wartime life in Germany, however. By this time, as Mischka told it to me, Olga and he were anticipating a relatively imminent German defeat, and Dresden, in the east of Germany, was likely to fall under Soviet rather than English-American occupation. The plan was to get themselves to Flensburg, close to the northern border with Denmark, and, if possible, over the border. Mischka’s interest in Denmark was because of the physicist Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, but Olga, with her broad network of useful acquaintances, probably had some contacts there, as she did in Flensburg. They both started to pack up, the plan being to travel separately. (When I asked why they went separately, Mischka looked surprised and said it was obviously the best way: if one fell into misfortune, the other wouldn’t be dragged in.)
Mischka had a room in a big, cold house in Dresden with a congenial landlady. He decided to give a farewell party on 13 February 1945, before setting out across Germany via Hamburg to Flensburg. That happened to be the night the Allies bombed Dresden and reduced the city to rubble.
6
The Bombing of Dresden
Nanni Schuster, 1945. Photo enclosed in a letter she gave Mischka as he left Dresden after the bombing.<
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MISCHKA left two accounts of the Dresden bombing. One was in his diary, which he wrote up two months later, in April 1945, the other written for me as a musing half a century later. The similarity is remarkable, all the more as I am almost sure that Mischka had not reread the diary and indeed had forgotten about its existence (I found it in a box of his mother’s papers after he died). In this chapter, I will let Mischka speak for himself as much as possible, interspersing the two accounts. (To distinguish them, the musing is presented in a sanserif font, and the diary in a serif font.) The musing is as he wrote it, with only typos and some idiosyncrasies of spelling corrected:
Around February I had decided that the time approached when I will have to leave Dresden. The Russians made steady advances, and who knows when and where the Allies would be. Also, any occupation would be associated with at least artillery, more likely also with air and tank assaults. We had talked with my mother about what to do and had decided to ‘evacuate’ to Flensburg, border town to Denmark.
No, or at most very little, war activities should happen there. In preparation I decided to give a goodbye party. Indeed I invited some 6 or 7 acquaintances, students all, to my place. As a treat I made kissel [a Russian fruit jelly], I forget with which fruits as the base. So, we were eating that stuff, when suddenly, without any warning or reason the door, which was closed, keeled into the room, it seemed quite slowly, but inexorably, and remained on the floor in a horizontal position. That interrupted the party, and in fact ended it; we walked down into the basement, where there already were the neighbors, with distraught expressions on their faces, standing around and not talking, but listening—which we also commenced to do, and indeed some noise of explosions, distant, could be heard. Then nothing further seemed to happen; so I went to the basement entrance and looked out, and saw 2 Mosquitoes (British 2-motor fighter-bombers, made of wood) passing overhead, but doing nothing. After they left, nothing. A lull took over.