by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
The journey home across the city, suitcase in hand, was not without incident, as the musing recalls:
I retrace the path of yesterday, circumnavigating the Altstadt. As I reach the TH an air raid is sounded. I run to that field a few hundred m[etres] ahead. As I reach it I hear the noise of falling hardware, drop the suitcase and run toward the middle of the field to get away from the trees—the sleeping boy of yesterday must have been killed by a falling tree limb. I drop to the ground; a number of small bombs detonate; some clumps of soil thrown into the air fall around and on me, I run towards the closest crater, but that is the end of the raid. I go back to pick up the suitcase, and there it is, on the rim of a crater, with a dent but not a hole. It remains usable.
The diary tells this story too, reiterating a point of personal scientific observation made several times in his narrative, that ‘no fear or other embarrassing feeling was discernible’. By this time, Mischka had had enough of writing down the story, but he had one more remarkable sight to record:
What I saw, I don’t want to go into further; it would be too much and there isn’t enough space to tell it all. Just one thing, a more idyllic sight: across the street, in between the people—and without worrying about them, or about the cars bouncing over the holes in the bitumen—slowly walks a young giraffe. Without haste, her head held high, she disappears into the undergrowth in the Grosse Garten.
‘Ausgebombt, gesund’ (bombed out, unhurt) was the laconic message Mischka sent his mother in Aussig. ‘Write post restante to the address you know in Flensburg. You go too!’ This is one of the occasions when German efficiency astonishes: the medium was an ‘express message’ sent by telegram, explicitly marked as a notification of survival and thus probably free; and it arrived.
It was actually almost a month before he set out. First there was a romantic interlude with a young German woman, Marianne (Nanni) Schuster, whom he had met sometime the previous autumn, probably at the university. Nanni came from Chemnitz in Saxony, and Mischka had evidently visited, or at least tried to visit, her family there, but they seem to have been friends rather than lovers until early in the new year. In the diary account of the bombing, his despairing feeling that nobody could have survived didn’t last long ‘because I was pleased, but not at all surprised to find a letter from MS waiting for me at home’. She had sat out the raid in the basement of her house, which, although ‘located about 1 km from where the [dead] sleeping boy was’, lay in the direction away from the Altstadt and had come through intact. The afternoon of his return from dropping off the Karl May girl, Nanni came over to Planettastrasse. The musing records that they decided to set off together to her family home, about 80 kilometres to the west:
Packing just some minimum into the briefcase, … off we went, to the West, essentially going from station to station to find a still functioning one. Indeed we got to such by the evening; a train was expected the next morning. We were sent to the chateaux of the local whatever, who provided a barn or such for refugees passing through town. There was straw on the floor, and a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. We, together with the 50 or so other refugees put ourselves down, in the manner Vonnegut, in his book on the Dresden bombing, described as ‘like stacked spoons’—even though it was only a family—in our case, two—at a time … Next morning indeed a train appeared and later that day we arrived in Chemnitz; they lived far from the town, out of harm’s way; the father, being a village doctor, had not been called up.
Mischka had left a message for his mother outside his Dresden lodgings—a piece of cardboard attached to a stick, as was the custom that had evolved during the war. His mother duly came up from Tetschen-Bodenbach to look for him, and in fact didn’t see his message, but the neighbours told her he was all right. As promised in his stick-message, Mischka made his way to Tetschen-Bodenbach within a week (taking a roundabout route from Chemnitz, since you couldn’t get through Dresden). In the next week, he went back and forth between Chemnitz and Tetschen-Bodenbach a few times, and he and Nanni made an excursion back to Dresden as well, going on their bicycles to pick up some of her things that had been left behind. All of this probably had its idyllic aspect for Mischka and Nanni—in a letter written two years later, when they were already divided by being in different occupation zones, Nanni referred to 13 February 1945, ‘Dresden’s death-day’, as ‘our birthday’—but horror was not far away. During the bicycle trip, they passed the main railway station, ‘where the corpses were—still!—being extracted from the underground shelter’. In his diary, Mischka recorded that he ‘had learnt to think over these things coolly and without getting upset, not letting them have an impact on me’, but this was patently not the case. Of his later visits, he wrote:
I have seen the horrors and their traces. Now I am probably already immune. And at the same time not immune. But the horror remains in Dresden, it is still there. One month after the attack I stood at the main station: one track and platform were sufficiently repaired for the commuter train Pirma-Meissen to be running again. Prager Street had been cleared down the centre to allow the traffic through. Men were already working on further repairs of the main station. And yet: the horror of the city that had once been was still alive, and had everybody in its power. About 300 people were standing there, waiting for the train to Pirma. They weren’t waiting for the train the way you usually wait, relaxed, impatient or frustrated, but with fear deep inside: will it come or not? Usually a crowd feels safe where an individual might break down; here even that didn’t help …
On top of everything else, Mischka had fallen in love. Now there was the question of whether his future was with, or without, Nanni. A diary entry for 27 February 1945, written in an extremely stilted and convoluted style, probably to prevent too much expression of distress, indicates that Mischka had asked Nanni to come with him to Flensburg (which presumably meant marrying him) but she hadn’t been ready for the drastic step of leaving her home and family for the unknown. ‘I played for a while with the thought to turn aside from my own path and to try to continue on not alone,’ Mischka wrote. But there is in fact no indication that he ever considered not leaving for Flensburg; the ‘turning aside from my own path’ probably meant adding a personal commitment that might compromise his commitment to physics. But Nanni (‘the case in question’ in Mischka’s agonised circumlocutions) ‘disappointed me … because she is staying at home, or, more exactly, because she has given up the struggle without actually really having begun it’. He had ‘hoped that another result was possible’, and even his mother, who had managed to make Nanni’s acquaintance at this period, had been encouraging. But Nanni thought it was too much for her to handle, and perhaps, he concluded, this was the best thing for her. To sum up, naturally in quotation marks (I don’t know from what piece of German romantic poetry): ‘Du bist doch mein schoenstes Erlebnisgewesen’ (‘You were my most beautiful experience’).
On 12 March 1945, almost a month after the bombing, Mischka finally set off from Chemnitz to Flensburg. On the train, he opened the letter Nanni had given him on parting and found her photograph (he kept it in his diary, so it is now in my possession, and I have put it at the head of this chapter; a sweet, serious young woman, not spineless—but not a risk-taker either). ‘What a strong impression a picture can make!’ he wrote in his diary as he sat in the train. Opening the envelope and seeing her face, ‘I got something like a blow to the chest.’ The next day, he tried to make sense of the Nanni affair in his diary entry, comparing it with an earlier parting in Riga in September 1943, but got distracted by the thought that ‘between 9.43 and 3.45, a year and a half has passed’, including things that were ‘quite alarmingly awful’. But ‘perhaps that is going to change’. Half a century later, skipping over the parting from Nanni (whom he calls ‘Blue-eyes’ in this text), he concluded his Dresden musing with a bit of mathematician’s number-play about his date of departure, which doesn’t mean he wasn’t in earnest: ‘In my memory on the date 12345 begins a new ch
apter.’
7
Displaced Persons in Flensburg
Mischka in Flensburg infectious diseases hospital, spring 1945. Nothing is known of the circumstances in which the photo was taken or the identity of the orderly and Wehrmacht soldier on either side of his bed.
TWO days after 12.3.45, Mischka was on a train en route to Hamburg. His suitcase, containing some clothes and twenty volumes of Zeitschrift für Physik, was wedged into a rucksack made in Olga’s Tetschen-Bodenbach workshop to his own design (the suitcase could be opened without extracting it from the rucksack). His spirits were buoyant, despite the stresses of previous weeks. ‘Now I am sitting in the D-train, 1 st class, alone in the compartment, and waiting for the departure,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Life is still beautiful!!’
A couple of weeks later, having arrived after many adventures in Flensburg, he took up the story:
The trip was quite amusing. It began in the 1st class of the D train. So it went quite fine until Hanover, when they announced: All out, the train stops here. A D-train should have gone direct to Hamburg at 9.45 (it was about 7 am), but it went, as it turned out, absolutely not as far as Hamburg (just as the one before didn’t go as far as Bremen), so I had the pleasure of hearing the announcement: Passengers travelling to Hamburg take the train to Celle. I got in and went to Celle. And then came the ‘bombing time’, in which Hanover was supposed to be destroyed. This circumstance, which was repeated relatively often, filled me with concern about my suitcase. But at midday a train went to Ulsen and at 2 am even further to Hamburg … I was at Hamburg main station by 5.
In Hamburg, he stopped off to deliver something to a Frau Neuendorf from Frau Bach (a friend of Olga’s, so no doubt the commission came from her), checked that his suitcase had not been lost along the way and stayed two nights in a guesthouse. All this is related in jaunty style in the diary, despite the danger from Allied bombing, which hit Hamburg, with its docks and oil refineries, particularly hard. Actually he was lucky: having struck Hamburg on 8, 9, 10 and 11 March, the British bombers took a rest until 20 March. (Mischka was probably still in Hamburg then, but does not mention the raid.) In his guest-house, he made the acquaintance of a fellow guest, ‘a young woman from the other world’ (can this be an American? a Russian? a fellow Balt?) whom he was eager to know better. But then Mischka was struck by a catastrophe of another kind: he fell ill, which ‘hindered me from greater activity, and also liquidated a greater interest [in the young woman]. So I didn’t get as much from beautiful Hamburg as I might have done.’
The sickness turned out to be diphtheria, and that was serious. The diary glosses over the process by which, although sick, he managed to get on the train to Flensburg, but I remember what he told me about it. A sympathetic doctor in Hamburg diagnosed the diphtheria and told him that his official advice was to present himself immediately at an infectious diseases hospital, but his personal advice was to go straight to the station, before he got even sicker, and hope he made it to his destination. Mischka liked that kind of joke, even though it wasn’t a joking matter. Somehow he got himself to the station at Hamburg, caught the train and, after a while, arrived in Flensburg. As far as I can remember, he said he was in bad shape by the time the train got to Flensburg and had to be helped off the train by fellow passengers. But the diary entry, written in hospital in a slightly dazed state, says nothing of this, simply reporting the saga of his admission to hospital.
Although it was after midnight (probably the night of the 24–25 March), registration at the Flensburg station medical point was surprisingly quick. An ambulance arrived within a quarter of an hour and took him off to the Flensburg City Hospital for admission to the infectious diseases ward. But then the whole efficient process broke down:
We came with the car into the courtyard. Then nothing happened. The driver got out and tried to ring in one of the buildings. He pressed various bells in front, behind. He tried to ring at the main building, but nothing happened; as sole reaction a dog in a kennel barked—then he came back and finally found a door where he was able to ring. Then a nurse came out, but only to give the information that this was not the right ward, and she didn’t know where he could find the proper nurse. But no, after half an hour of standing in the courtyard a door suddenly opened and out came a nurse to take me to reception … Then we came to the reception formalities, that they put me in a bed, gave me an injection and turned the light out. The thing I missed most was a bath. And then the first impression: a room, half dark, phlegm and spit in all corners; everyone was writhing in his place, groaning in various registers; a night light covered with a shade that had a relatively small opening, and all the time the groans and writhing—No! Out of here as fast as possible!
But that, obviously, wasn’t possible, even though Mischka (perhaps slightly delirious?) seems to have examined the ventilation outlet in the wall and decided that while you could get in through it, you couldn’t get out. So he stayed, and in the morning things seemed a bit better, though not much. He felt he had run out of ‘spiritual energy’ and was so tired that even making notes in his diary exhausted him. The doctor on his daily rounds aroused all his anti-authoritarian reactions and dislike of being treated as an inferior being:
When he examined me the first time, he found it necessary to look inside my mouth. As his command, ‘Mouth open’, did not produce a reaction of sufficient magnitude, he repeated his order very loudly and in a way that from a normal man could only be described as a scream.
As his condition improved, Mischka got to know some of the other patients and orderlies, two of whom are shown beside his bed in a photograph miraculously taken and preserved. He also encountered a prisoner of war and an Ostarbeiter (forced labourer from the East) in the hospital, the first in either category he had met face to face.
He scribbled a note in pencil to his mother on 25 March, giving his location and a very brief account of his illness and hospitalisation—‘I had become a breeding ground for the diphtheria bacillus. The first impression (at night) was naturally not too cheerful, but now it’s OK.’ In the note, which may never have been sent, Mischka’s narrative wanders all over the place, fretting about his suitcase, reporting on the visit to Frau Neuendorf, and finally almost apologising for having landed in hospital:
I thought I had made a big mistake coming here, to a place I can’t get out of so easily. But in the first place what else could I have done? The serum which I need as someone with diphtheria I couldn’t get any other way, and to infect a camp is also not the correct thing. But it has to be emphasised that it’s not so awful now, we’re about seven people per room …
Olga was already in Flensburg, and must have been beside herself with anxiety. It wasn’t until 6 April that Mischka dispatched two identical postcards to Olga, one to Flensburg’s central post office, the other to Olga’s poste restante address at the Timm Kroeger School on Pferdewasser in the city, telling her what had happened. Even then, his concentration was a bit impaired: after having told Olga about the baggage problem (‘The big suitcase is most likely sitting here at the station; I gave it in on my ticket in Hamburg. I still don’t have any information about my things’), he added inconsequentially, and probably inaccurately, that in the hospital ‘I occupied myself mainly with theoretical physics’. Then, after signing off, he noticed the physics remark came out of left field and added a postscript—‘The second last sentence is illogical … Verbal communication is easier’—before repeating the message about the big suitcase as if he hadn’t already dealt with it.
Mischka remained in hospital for almost two weeks. At the end of the first week, he recorded his surprise at realising what had gone on in the world while he was temporarily absent:
Yesterday evening I heard with the greatest astonishment that already this Sunday, that is, the day after tomorrow, it will be Easter. Palm Sunday has passed, without the Passion etc. And in this connection, it turned out that for the first time I started thinking about food. And what I tho
ught about was Pascha [the Russian Eastern sweet] and the braised pork with red cabbage that is the great Austrian dish.
The lead-up to Easter wasn’t the only thing Mischka had missed. He had also missed, and apparently still failed to notice, the lead-up to the end of the war. The Western Allies were across the Rhine and had taken Frankfurt. Austria, pork and cabbage and all, had been conquered by Soviet forces. The last great encounter of the European war, the Battle of Berlin, started two weeks after Mischka got out of hospital. On 30 April, Hitler killed himself in his bunker. On 2 May, German forces finally surrendered Berlin to the Soviet Army.
The war was over. A defeated Germany came under Allied military occupation. Mischka and Olga were now refugees, officially categorised as ‘displaced persons’. These were momentous events, for the world as well as for the Danoses, but we know next to nothing about Mischka’s and Olga’s reactions. This is partly because, once the two were reunited in Flensburg, they no longer corresponded. They were not writing to anyone else, either, because ordinary citizens had no access to inter-zonal or international postal services for some months. Comment on world events was totally absent from their diaries. Olga, whose diary deals explicitly with the personal, made only one entry for the whole of 1945, in which she summed up her underlying state of mind for the year as ‘ironic sadness’. Mischka confined his relatively few post-hospital entries in Flensburg to philosophy, physics and girlfriends.
Had he only been paying attention in Flensburg, there would have been a lot to write about. The Danoses had chosen Flensburg, a northern coastal city in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, because it was close to the Danish border and they expected it would be quiet. But it wasn’t as quiet as they anticipated. When Hitler killed himself at the end of April, he designated Admiral Karl Doenitz, Commander in Chief of the Navy, as Germany’s president. As it happened, Doenitz’s headquarters were in Flensburg, which thus became the site of the short-lived Doenitz government. It was from Flensburg, on 6 May, that the Doenitz government authorised unconditional surrender of German armed forces to the Allies and declared Flensburg an open city. Allied troops, led by Field Marshal Montgomery, entered the city without resistance on 6 May. On the eve of their arrival, someone on the British side had taken the trouble to tell the local radio station to stop playing Wagner.