by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
One of my most puzzling discoveries in Misha’s papers is an UNRRA attestation to his residence at Zeilsheim DP camp in the American zone. It was dated 15 October 1945 and renewed on 31 December 1946. This is odd, not only because Mischka was never in residence there for any length of time but also because Zeilsheim, on the outskirts of Frankfurt, was specifically a Jewish DP camp, visited as such by Eleanor Roosevelt a few months later. The story got stranger when I found his name on a list of foreigners of Latvian citizenship compiled by the Jewish Community of Frankfurt. This ‘Michael Danos’ was a university student who shared Mischka’s birth date (10 January 1922) and former home (Riga) but gave a Frankfurt street address (not the address of the Zeilsheim camp) and claimed to have been born in Pleskau (that is, Pskov, in the Soviet Union). This Michael Danos is not specifically identified as Jewish, but the purpose of the documents appears to have been to register Jewish foreigners. The date of the document was 21 June 1947, a time when Mischka was midway through his studies at Hanover Technical University in the British zone. What was he doing there?
I don’t know how to explain Mischka’s phantom two-year existence as a Jewish DP in the American zone. But in DP terms, it never hurt to keep your options open. Universities in the American zone were not excluded from his search in the autumn of 1945, and if he had ended up enrolling in one of them, he would have needed to be registered as a DP in that zone. Mind you, the timing is puzzling, since according to his diary, he wasn’t even in the Frankfurt area on 15 October, though he passed through a couple of week later. My guess is that on his trip he met some old Riga acquaintances who were in Zeilsheim and signed up with them, just in case.
As for the subsequent maintenance of the registration, I suspect that Simon Mirkin, a survivor of the Jewish family Olga had protected in Riga during the German occupation, was a factor here. Initially brought to Germany by the Germans as a concentration camp prisoner in August 1944, he became a DP in the American zone when the war ended, working in Frankfurt for the Americans and the Jewish refugee aid organisation HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). Mirkin was officially registered as a resident of the Zeilsheim camp, though he actually lived in town. He had made contact with Olga in September 1946, telling her of his own survival and his father’s death in Buchenwald, and promising to visit her in Flensburg next month. From that point he became a fixture in the Danos DP world.
Mischka’s early November trip to Frankfurt included a stop off in Verden, a small town midway between Hamburg and Hanover. There seems no earthly reason for him to go there except that that was where the family of Mischka’s old Riga friend Andrejs Bičevskis had regrouped as refugees after leaving Riga in the autumn of 1944. His diary notes the trip, but not its purpose or outcome (forty years later, he still had the characteristic of overlooking concrete practical details for a lofty overview). In this case, the loftiness had to do with falling in love, something I can scarcely complain about as he did it again with me decades later, but then it was a plane, not a train, and proved less ephemeral.
I took my seat in the train; I had even reserved … a place. Then various objects came flying through the compartment window: suitcases, packages, people. And suddenly a girl, extremely pleasant and simpatico. A ray of sunshine in the monotonous grey of the indistinguishable mass of travellers.
Mischka and the girl got to know each other over the ten hours of the trip, and he was still thinking about her four days later, when he wrote his unsent letter to her on the trip back. ‘My peace is gone and my unstable equilibrium destroyed,’ he noted anxiously. But things were looking up all the same, as he had reconnected with his old friend Andrejs Bičevskis— not, apparently, in Verden, but in Brunswick in the second or third week of November.
The Bičevskis family had had its own adventures. Andrejs had been called up by the Germans in 1943 to serve in one of the so-called ‘Latvian’ units that fought under German command. His elder brother was also called up and sent to the Russian front, where he was killed almost immediately. Andrejs was luckier. A first-class basketball player, he avoided being sent to the front because his team manager, serving as an officer with the Germans, pulled strings to have him assigned to a shipyard as a labourer. As the Soviet Army approached in 1944, Andrejs’s brother-in-law lined up a fisherman to take the family to Sweden, but something went wrong—as with the Danos brothers’ attempt—and Andrejs was left stranded. He was rescued again by his old team manager, who sent a motorcycle to pick him up and bring him to his unit, with which he retreated by boat to Germany in October 1944. The next months were spent with the unit, fleeing from the advancing Soviet Army in Eastern Germany, but by May 1945 they had made it to the Elbe, where Andrejs parted company with the Germans, crossed the Elbe with a group of Dutch concentration camp survivors and made his way, mainly on foot, to Verden, in what was by then the British zone of Germany, where he rejoined his sister, brother-in-law and mother.
The Bičevskis family was now living in the ‘Rosalie’ DP camp, where Mischka signed in as well, another apparent double registration (since he was already registered in Flensburg), which, as a bonus, brought him some new clothes from UNRRA stores. Mrs Bičevskis did his laundry, as he informed his mother. To find a friend again was an enormous relief, though Mischka would never have admitted it; the jaundiced attitude to his fellow men noted by Olga in Flensburg lifted. He even suspended his anti-nationalist principles enough to enjoy himself at a party celebrating the declaration of Latvian independence on 18 November (1918). Marjorie Broadhurst, an English UNRRA official attending the party, took a fancy to Mischka and Andrejs—it was their ‘friendship for one another’ that appealed to her, she wrote later, ‘and, of course, your determination to get on’. They liked her too. ‘She wasn’t a deep person,’ Mischka later wrote, ‘but just positive and decent and even quite admirable.’ She figures in Mischka’s story, albeit briefly, as virtually the only occupation official who, in his perception, treated him like a human being.
Mischka and Andrejs both applied to the Brunswick Technical University, which was not yet in operation but was supposed to be opening soon. In the process, they met up with another old friend from Riga, Boris Bogdanovs. Mischka quickly located a newly opened sports hall and made himself useful as ‘chief referee’, though in what branch of sport I don’t know. He also signed up, perhaps under the Bičevskis influence, with the Latvian committee in Germany, identifying his residence as Brunswick; his name as Michaels Danos (either a typo or an Anglo-Latvian compromise, ‘s’ being the suffix for male names in Latvian); his profession as student; and his citizenship as Latvian.
Mischka and his friends were in the first wave of DP students clamouring to enter German universities as they reopened, and it took the authorities a while to regularise the situation. It wasn’t until the summer of 1946 that UNRRA and the zonal authorities established some centralised control, forbidding DPs to apply except via UNRRA, banning inter-zonal movement except in extraordinary circumstances and doing their best to ‘prevent flow of persons without authority into University towns’ in the British zone. But by that time they had forced the Germans to accept a very generous quota of 10 per cent of all university enrolments for DPs (who were only about 1 per cent of population in the British zone) and had put them in the same rations category as administrative workers.
In the end, Brunswick didn’t take Mischka and his friends, but nearby Hanover, which reopened in early January 1946, did; he and Bičevskis must have been among the first DP students to enrol. ‘I am now living in Hanover,’ Mischka wrote laconically to his mother on 15 January 1946:
I have finally been admitted. To Hanover [Technical University]. I like it very much here. Only I haven’t yet got a permanent place to live … Hanover is a bigger city [than Brunswick]. Quite kaput. The technical university is also quite kaput. The whole organisation of my life is now somewhat thrown into confusion by this unexpected change.
Then, on 23 January, came a postcard about his ‘strangely
hard-working mood, which for the present threatens not to lessen’. This awkward circumlocution meant he was pleased with himself. The card gave Olga no practical information at all about his circumstances but meditated on his own capacity for single-minded concentration on a particular scientific question, regardless of contingent circumstances. He was ‘surprised in the highest degree’ by this burst of intellectual energy, noting with satisfaction that he was defying the old saw that in order to graduate from university, ‘one must treat no issue or problem as anything but superficial, and do nothing except work assignments and protocols’.
Olga was a loving mother who believed in Mischka’s genius, but even so, she must have been relieved when a more informative letter followed:
I am now living in Hanover. I will be studying here from now on at the technical university. Things are going very well, and it is also very interesting in that here the students are given a great deal of freedom and independence about doing measurements in the laboratory—probably the greatest in Germany. Thus I can understand why this TU is regarded as notoriously difficult. But it is a real joy to work here, and it is actually very easy if one isn’t afraid to do some thinking. And then there is an electrotechnical specialist here who is really worth listening to …
On 12 January, Mischka received an identity card signed by the university rector in the name of ‘Michael Danos. Student in the electrotechnical faculty, from Flensburg. Latvian citizenship.’ So he was a student again, someone with a place and function in the world. Not on his own, as he had been in Dresden, but with a bunch of old friends around him (another of his old Riga circle, Dailonis Stauvers, soon showed up, along with Mārtin Kregŝde, in addition to Bičevskis and Bogdanovs). Mischka’s university card didn’t even identify him as a DP.
8
Olga, from Flensburg to Fulda
Olga with her sculptures (Miami Herald, 27 June 1954). The figurines at left and centre are probably earlier work, done in Germany; the bust at right, made in the early 1950s in the United States, is of her son Arpad.
ONE of the advantages of being a DP was that you didn’t have to do anything: UNRRA, or later the International Refugee Organization (IRO), would look after you. Conversely, one of the disadvantages of being a DP was that there was nothing much to do. Olga was not someone to sit around with folded hands, so she looked for an occupation.
She started off, like any other educated, middle-class DP with artistic interests, thinking along cultural lines. She wrote a few poems, translated some fairytales and even once stood in for her sister Mary as a singer at a concert in Hamburg. Mary, who had survived the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbrück and was living in a DP camp in Geesthacht, not far from Hamburg, had more serious professional intent as a singer: by the end of the 1940s, she seems to have re-established herself as a recitalist on the boundary of folk and art music. But Olga didn’t see herself as a professional musician after so long away from singing, and her artistic activities were all make-work within the confines of the DP community. With the encouragement and financial support of the occupation authorities, DP exhibitions, DP journals, DP concerts and even DP universities flourished—but they were hothouse plants, catering to small, national DP clienteles, and essentially amateur, even when the artists and scholars involved were former professionals.
When the British zonal authorities sent round a questionnaire on DPs’ former occupations and their trade and professional skills, Olga, with DP cunning, ‘was silent about her tailoring capacities but listed my six languages’, presumably in the hope that UNRRA would throw translating opportunities her way. But she was already investigating the possibility of re-establishing her tailoring workshop. Her future daughter-in-law, Helga Heimers, remembered Olga as a person with tremendous flair and energy for getting things started, though not so good on routine follow-up. The former qualities are evident as she bustled around setting herself up in tailoring. ‘As you know,’ she wrote cheerfully to Mischka, ‘I have no money. But, as you also know, that is no big obstacle.’
The British started encouraging DPs to work from the spring of 1946, even trying unsuccessfully to make it mandatory. But the proportion of DPs with jobs remained low, and of those who worked, most had jobs within the camps, working for UNRRA. Olga’s idea of setting up her own business outside the camps was so unusual that UNRRA’s labour statistics for DPs didn’t even have such a category.
It was complicated setting up a business as a DP. You needed to have German trade credentials (Meisterbrief), which DPs generally didn’t possess. Olga was in a better position than most, in that she had gone through some of these hoops already in 1944, when she moved her business from Riga to the Sudetenland. ‘I hope to keep the membership in the Artisan List that I already had in Sudetenland,’ she wrote to Mischka, although unfortunately she had left her Riga Artisan Card there. Mischka got regular bulletins on her business activities. ‘Things are still going quite bumpily with the workshop,’ she told him in March 1946. ‘In the first place with workers: there are not many of them, and those that are available are bad.’ By the end of April 1946, however, she had two workers and an apprentice, and was anticipating adding to her staff.
At this point, the enterprise was evidently still based in a DP camp, probably the Geesthacht camp where Mary lived, whose UNRRA director had offered help and the promise of space. But Olga was already thinking of bigger things. ‘A workshop in Flensburg is in prospect,’ she wrote, ‘and I will also get a workplace in Hamburg.’ By late May, possibly earlier, Olga had moved her residence to central Flensburg (Jürgenstrasse 4), where she planned to set up the workshop, and wrote to Mischka that he should come and visit—‘I have a good piano at home’ (presumably she was a tenant and the piano was the landlady’s). She was to have two rooms, one of them for the workshop, and ‘am bringing two [sewing-] machines from the camp. Two very lazy women workers are already working, and on 1 June another three women, hopefully better workers, are coming on board.’
Her financial situation was precarious, and in retrospect she confessed a certain degree of anxiety: ‘For a long time I was sitting here without a penny. I thought that if I died, there would be nothing to bury me with. But now things are going better … Customers are taking their things [and presumably paying for them].’ Olga, accordingly, was once again on a high. In a cheeky postscript to a July letter to Mischka, she suggested, ‘If I have a workshop in both places [Hamburg and Flensburg], I should get a car too, don’t you think?’
But the roller-coaster continued, and a month or so later she was writing that while she was still negotiating with UNRRA and the Hamburg authorities for the necessary permissions,
it’s not working out with the workshop. Now I have workers, I feed them, [but] everything is collapsing because I can only become a ‘free-liver’ [that is, a registered DP living outside the camps] if I get the workshop approval, and that is something no DP has done so far.
Part of the problem was living in the British occupation zone, which was more restrictive of small businesses than the American one. ‘Should I go to the American zone?’ Olga wrote to Mischka. But if she went there to establish a business, that meant leaving UNRRA care and giving up her status as a DP. This move—officially described as being ‘discharged on to the German economy’—was still uncommon and purely voluntary as of the autumn of 1946, although the next year the British authorities started to encourage it to reduce the numbers in their care. It was a risk, and Olga wrote that she was at her ‘wits’ end, waiting for a decision to come of itself’. But by mid September, she had decided. She would give up her DP status and move out of the British zone in order to establish her tailoring business in the American zone.
This might have seemed a momentous decision, but even before it was made, the volatile Olga seemed to have lost interest. She was now ‘almost certain to leave UNRRA’, she informed Mischka in mid August, but ‘that’s not the most important thing’. The most important thing was that she was now launch
ing a new career as a sculptor.
Back in the 1920s in Italy and later in Riga, Olga had dabbled in sculpture. Now she had taken it up again, making little porcelain figurines, some of secular subjects (‘The Dancer’), others religious (a Pieta, a Madonna and a St Antony). This was becoming a passion, as she told Mischka in July: ‘Can you believe it, my zeal for modelling is still to the fore. It’s even as if I have to do it Early reactions from friends and acquaintances were mixed. One thought she shouldn’t be making religious figures given that she was not a believer. Another thought that one of her little figures looked like a naked Frederick the Great, evidently not a compliment as she forthwith decapitated it, unfortunately breaking the torso and an arm in the process.
But then the wonderful moment of first recognition arrived. It came from a certain Dr Richter, ‘whose father was a well-known sculptor in Dresden’. Having seen her figurines, he surprised her by asking to look at them again: ‘After he had examined them in silence for a long time, he said, a bit abashed: “I admire and envy your muse. What other more famous sculptors wrestle with, you achieve easily. The last figure is really Greek …’” Olga felt that she had finally found her artistic vocation. ‘It looks possible that a new period in my life is opening,’ she wrote enthusiastically to Mischka.
On the more mundane level, she had to get the move to the American zone organised. Her chosen destination was Fulda, 100 kilometres or so north of Frankfurt in the state of Hesse. This was almost certainly because Simon Mirkin, her Jewish protégé from Riga, had offered her a place to live there. Mirkin, who had survived the Riga ghetto and the Stutthof concentration camp to become a DP in the American zone, was grateful to Olga for saving his family in the early years of the war; in his first postwar letter to her, he related his father’s last words before their separation (when Boris Mirkin was sent off to Buchenwald, where he died on 19 February 1945): ‘My son, when some day we are freed, we must meet up at Frau Danos’s house in Riga.’ Working as an interpreter for HIAS and the US Army, Mirkin had substantially better rations and access to goods than the Danoses had in the British zone, and their correspondence in subsequent months periodically mentions food and clothing he had sent them. But, best of all, Mirkin seems to have owned a house in Fulda, presumably inherited from his businessman father. This house, at Florengasse 53, was his registered address as a DP until his departure for the United States early in 1947. After Olga moved to Fulda in the winter of 1946–47, it was to become both her residence and the address of her tailoring shop, now upgraded to the Olga Danos ‘Fashion Salon, Bespoke Clothing to Your Own Pattern’.