by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
Mischka’s advice was expanded in a later letter, after he had consulted his Latvian student friends Bičevskis and Stauvers. They thought ‘it wouldn’t hurt to write a letter saying something like that we would be happy to return, but have to stay here for a while’. In other words, to convey the idea that they were not planning immediate repatriation without explicitly ruling it out, so that Arpad couldn’t be blamed for having anti-Soviet relatives. Only the minimum of information about themselves should be offered; after all, Arpad knew they had survived. ‘Exact information on my doings is not appropriate,’ Mischka wrote sternly to Olga. ‘And not about yours either.’
In the same year, Olga received worse news from Riga: her husband, Arpad Sr, had died. The family information on this is that Arpad’s marriage plans had fallen through, and after the singing pupil had left the city, he started neglecting his health and not taking insulin for his diabetes. The woman then changed her mind and came back to Riga, but it was too late: he was dead. Jan and Arpad attended the funeral. But this backstory was probably unknown to Olga and Mischka for another decade, when correspondence from within the Soviet Union became easier and Jan and Arpad Jr made contact. It is not clear exactly when Arpad Sr died, but the news had reached Olga and Mischka by June 1948.
Unlike Olga, Mischka gave little conscious thought to the family back in Riga, although a diary entry in 1945 notes that he often dreamt of them. His father’s death was a trauma that he quickly and rigorously suppressed. I thought at first that it went totally unmentioned in his correspondence and diary but then realised that it must be what he was writing about in two enigmatic entries reporting some unidentified shocking news in the summer of 1948:
It is remarkable, but probably commonplace [this word in English] that it seemed somehow empty of content, it doesn’t take root in my consciousness; it is really as if I haven’t grasped it. That ‘no longer existing’ is somehow so alien, calling forth something like fear, a sense of pure strangeness. Since Herr W [his landlord] has cheerfully turned the radio on, I absolutely can’t concentrate anymore.
This unwillingness to state the fact of a death, or even to use the word, remained characteristic of him throughout his life: ‘he ain’t no more’ was the odd way he would inform me in the 1990s that someone he knew was dead, and one felt that even that was being dragged out of him. The next day, 6 June 1948, he made another entry, even more clearly indicating the depths of his distress: ‘I see myself forced to do again something I already did once, that is again to go so far as to seek an analysis, although at the moment I don’t feel myself capable of it’. When or where this earlier analysis, evidently by a psychologist or psychoanalyst, took place is unknown, but Misha all his life had a respect for the discipline that I found surprising (and wrongly, as I now see, attributed to the influence of American popular culture in the 1950s). I doubt, also, that he carried out the analysis plan on this occasion, as if he had, it would probably have been mentioned when he started having panic attacks the following year. Insofar as I can make sense of the next sentences of the second diary entry, he thought news of his father’s death had had a ‘catalytic effect’ that might enable him, in the course of an analysis, to bring his feelings to the surface and make it possible for him to express them. Yet even half a century later, Misha spoke only unwillingly and tensely about his father’s death.
Olga probably told Mischka of the death face to face; at any rate, there is no mention of it in their surviving correspondence, other than a sad reference in a letter from her in the summer. Her main confidant about the death was her diary. She recorded the news on 2 April 1948, noting that this would be the last entry in ‘the book of her marriage’:
I can scarcely see for tears, but I have a duty to write in it. You, to whom the highest feelings of my life belong, lie under the earth. Dead, like my mother, without my being able to lighten their last hours. No, much worse, abandoned by me, left alone, unhappy. I sob, as I have heard women sob, take myself in hand and then burst out in a long loud sob. Now that I have written it out, I am calm. I will not weep any more. All the tears of my life have now been wept for you, and for me, I again wept at your death as I wept often in so many pages of this book. The last time I saw you was as the ship sailed away … As the ship turned, I came to the prow and saw you walking away. Slowly like an old man, supporting yourself with a stick. You didn’t turn round again, and I watched as step by step, slowly, tired, you walked and disappeared round the corner. You went home, quite alone, to remain quite alone … That hurts so deeply, even though I had long ago inwardly freed myself from you … I feel so tired of life, so old. Arpad is dead.
In fact, it was not quite the last entry. Four pages were left in the diary, and for her husband’s birthday in May, Olga filled them with a postscript, beginning with a careful transcription of Heinrich Heine’s lyric ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’ (‘In the Wonderful Month of May’), which Robert Schumann had set to music. It was the song Arpad had sung when they had first met and he had singled her out as his future bride. On that occasion, his friend had told her that if she married him, she would need courage. Now, she wrote, ‘that life, requiring too much courage, is now [over]. And in the end I came to the end of it too. The end of my courage.’
In summation, Olga offered a poetic eulogy:
Somewhere stands a hill. Perhaps your daughter-in-law— our daughter-in-law—has planted some flowers. Perhaps it is forgotten, since time has forgotten you …
‘And that is all.’ So sounds the last of my thoughts devoted to you. The page lies before me. Your hand wrote those lines. And now it’s impossible to grasp that this hand is no more.
9
Student in Hanover
Student friends in Hanover, outside the flying school (c. 1947): from left, Dailonis Stauvers, Boris Bogdanovs, Andrejs Bičevskis and Mischka.
IN the photograph taken outside the flying school that was their official residence as displaced persons, Mischka and three fellow students, friends from Riga days, look on top of the world. They are good-looking, upstanding, even well dressed; who would think they were DPs? Bičevskis had happy memories of their student days in Hanover. He and Mischka and their friends hung out together and told a lot of jokes, Bičevskis told me; they were committed to not taking life too seriously. They didn’t dwell on the past or think about what had been lost during the war. They were enjoying the present and looking forward to the future.
At first glance, that doesn’t seem much like the Misha I knew, who took life seriously and, moreover, felt this was a human obligation. It isn’t exactly the Mischka reflected in the correspondence and diaries of the Hanover period either. There is a lot of philosophical musing in these documents, and a lot of anxiety—about his studies, his health, his girlfriends— which is sometimes addressed in oblique philosophical terms. And yet I can more or less believe in the Bičevskis version. Along with the essentially serious Misha, there was always another Misha around, someone who enjoyed company and flourished in it. It can’t have hurt, back in Hanover with his Riga friends, that he was the best-looking of the bunch (surely this is an objective judgement, not just my prejudice) as well as the brightest. That was the person his first wife, Helga, remembers meeting in 1948. Half a century later, I knew him too: the impromptu Misha, who was always ready to go out to celebrate nothing in particular or, if we stayed home, might dance me round the dining room table on the way to make dinner. Very early in our acquaintance, before I knew all this about him, I was surprised to find that Misha was in his element at parties, ‘drifting around’, as he would put it, with a relaxed half-smile on his lips, talking easily to everyone (or at least everyone but any Prominenz or self-important person who happened to be present, to whom he would also talk, but in a more challenging and less friendly way).
Misha kept many photos from the Hanover period, small, unlabelled black-and-white shots of him out on country walks with various unidentified girls, in groups at the university, running and
pole vaulting at sporting meets. We can even document the fact that Mischka, as well as Misha, was capable of clowning around, because there are some photographs of that as well. Of course, the face we present for a casual snapshot with friends on a day out is different from that of the diarist, writing alone in the evening, and who knows which face is the ‘real’ one. In the photos, unlike the diaries of this period, Mischka comes across as happy.
Hanover in 1946 was not everyone’s idea of an earthly paradise. The British zone was the most highly populated in Germany and had contained much of Germany’s industry. But by the end of the war, its industry was largely destroyed and its towns devastated by bombing and flooded with refugees. The region’s own agriculture was nowhere near strong enough to feed the influx, and the supply of agricultural products from other zones was unreliable to say the least. In the cold winter of 1946–47, the food crisis in the British zone’s cities, including Hanover, was bad enough to produce strikes and street protests that continued into the spring.
Hanover itself had been a ‘disaster zone’ when Allied troops first entered it in the spring of 1945, looking ‘like a wound in the earth rather than a city’, as one British war correspondent remembered: ‘I could not recognize anywhere: whole streets had disappeared, and squares and gardens with them, covered over in piles of brick and stone and mortar.’ Allied bombing had levelled the centre of the city and destroyed or severely damaged most of the houses, as well as knocking out electricity, water and sewage systems. When the British established their occupation regime, Mischka was not the only person to find them arrogant. ‘They were the new Herrenvolk and lived a life tantamount to apartheid,’ a historian writes. ‘The officers kept separate from the men, the Army from the Control Commission, and everyone from the Germans.’
The British approach to the universities, as they gradually reopened between the autumn of 1945 and the spring of 1946, was relatively laissez-faire. Denazification kept some professors in limbo for a while, but the technical universities (Technische Hochschulen) were less affected than the universities proper. As for the student body, Wehrmacht veterans came flooding back into the universities, causing the British anxiety about rising Nazi sentiments. To counteract this, and punish the Germans, the Allies required that German universities accept a DP contingent of up to 10 per cent of the new enrolment in 1946. This was a huge target, never reached and soon lowered, but it served its purpose for the fairly small group of DPs like Mischka and his friends who were actually qualified for university study.
University students were the most privileged of DPs. They were mainly ‘free-livers’, which meant that although they were registered in a DP camp, they actually lived elsewhere, usually in town. (‘Free-livers’ is UNRRA’s terminology; it was a category of DPs for whom they remained responsible but about whom they knew very little.) Living privat, which is what Olga calls it in her letter, meant renting a room from a landlady, often a war widow, and paying in cigarettes (the DP cigarette ration was four packs a month, according to Stauvers’s recollection; cigarettes were essentially currency in Germany in the period before the Wdhrungsreform in 1947). Student lodgers would also be expected to help with heavy lifting round the house, and also sometimes contributed food from their DP rations, which their landlady would cook. Landladies often had books, pianos and pretty daughters. This was the way Misha had lived as a student in Dresden in 1944, and the way he and his friends lived as students in Hanover from the beginning of 1946.
There were more than a thousand DP students from the Baltic states in German universities in the British zone in 1946–47, with Latvians the largest group, probably in the range of 650–750. Hanover Technical University had more than a hundred DP students among its total of more than three thousand students, perhaps forty of them Latvians. Fifteen of them—including Mischka and his friends Stauvers, Bičevskis, Bogdanovs, Mārtiņ Kregŝde and Aleksandr Kors—were studying engineering. Among Mischka’s Hanover photos, members of this group appear often, separately and collectively, and he kept in touch with most of them for many years. The photo at the beginning of this chapter shows Mischka and his three closest friends outside the building of the former cadet flying school (Fliegerschule-Herrenhausen) in a suburb of Hanover, now the DP camp in which they were officially registered. They could have lived in the camp—which had rooms with four beds, with shower and lavatory along the corridor—but preferred to live outside in lodgings close by, all on the same street, Bičevskis remembers, but in different houses. (Stauvers fell in love with his landlady’s daughter.) They used to go to the Fliegerschule sometimes, though, to collect their rations, for lunch with table tennis or billiards afterwards and, in Misha’s case, to play the piano.
It was a great bonus for DPs who got into university to live outside the camps among Germans; it made them feel halfway normal, a Polish Jewish DP student remembered, able to believe in a future. That almost certainly applies to Mischka and his Latvian friends too. But in the case of these German-speaking Latvians, finishing their education in Germany was something they might well have done—and, in Mischka’s case, firmly intended to do—regardless of war. It was easy for them almost to forget that in actual fact they had landed at university in Hanover as wards of UNRRA whom war had forcibly displaced.
Hanover Technical University had come through the war without too much damage, other than to its buildings. But Mischka’s first impressions of the intellectual level of the institution—no doubt based on comparison with Barkhausen at Dresden—were not altogether positive. He wrote uneasily to Olga in May 1946 that he was feeling a bit as he had done back in Riga when he had had to transfer from his classical gymnasium to an inferior school: then, he ‘hadn’t wanted to go to school any more because it was just a way of passing the time’, and now ‘I have the unpleasant impression that the TH has nothing more to give me, nothing fundamental There may indeed have been problems, especially in theoretical physics, since some of Hanover’s theoretical positions (viewed with suspicion by the Nazis) had been filled by experimentalists. But a few weeks later, Mischka had discovered that there were actually some good (if not top) physicists in Hanover, ‘so perhaps something positive will come out of this semester’.
Although he was still studying electrical engineering, physics was what was on his mind. He reported almost reverentially to Olga on a talk by the great German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, from Göttingen, one of the founders of quantum mechanics:
Heisenberg is an unimposing, surprisingly young man [he was in his mid forties] with an unimposing voice [who gave] a paper completely without showmanship, absolutely unadorned, simple, clear and transparent. Conclusion: the more complicated a thing is, the more simply must one think. Heisenberg is one of the top people in the world.
This was an early indication of Mischka’s lifelong love affair not just with physics but specifically with theoretical physics. To be sure, in Dresden, Barkhausen had pulled him over to the experimental side, but as one of his Latvian friends commented at the time, that was something new for the ‘theorist’ Mischka had been in Riga. Mischka and Bičevskis seem to have briefly contemplated moving to Göttingen to work with Heisenberg and Otto Hahn (one of the discoverers of nuclear fission, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1944) before committing themselves to Hanover. Reflecting in a letter to Olga on the possibility of comparing human achievements in the natural sciences to those in philosophy and art, Mischka gave Heisenberg the edge over Goethe, if not over Beethoven.
Clearly Mischka had a commitment to science far beyond that of the run-of-the-mill student. But that didn’t mean that things were necessarily easy for him. Mischka liked learning, but he liked doing it in his own way. He was often resistant to being taught, and his teachers, accordingly, didn’t always appreciate his talents. All his life he had been very sensitive to what he called ‘the problem of academicism, of a teacher’s authority stifling independent thought’. In science and maths, he liked thinking up his own approaches and cou
ld be downright suspicious of those who tried to teach him standard techniques, which he suspected might compromise his sense of the whole. In Hanover, as earlier at the University of Riga, he tended to skip lectures and, in exams, insisted on working out his own proofs from scratch instead of reproducing the proofs that had been given in class. Nor did he always show the automatic respect for professors and the professorial status that was normal in German universities. No doubt, he wrote to a girlfriend [‘F.B.’] in 1946, he could become ‘a not so bad professor in high frequency technology’ (the area he had worked on with Barkhausen in Dresden), but he wasn’t sure that it was what he wanted: ‘I hate ordinariness and yearn for independent thinking.’
In science, Misha often had an instinctive understanding of phenomena, which he saw in pictures rather than words. It was a perennial issue for him that his mind operated differently from other people’s, and he was never sure whether his idiosyncratic way of approaching scientific problems made him intellectually inferior to other people or superior. This self-doubt was simultaneously assuaged and intensified by his mother’s unwavering belief in his genius. It was a problem all his life, as witness the musing on the topic he sent me early in our marriage: ‘First, I know—but better not admit!—that I am top. [But at the same time] I know that it is not true, that actually I am a fraud. By not admitting the first, I can keep also the second under wraps.’ Misha was a mature physicist with a solid reputation in his field when I met him, but it quickly became clear to me that some physicists saw him as a genius while others—probably the majority—ranked him lower or simply couldn’t understand him, and that this disparity of reactions worried him. Communicating his insights to other physicists was not easy, and my sense was that he did best when working with a collaborator who could act as a mediator. I experienced the communications problem at first-hand when he tried to teach me some physics: not only was it hard to understand him, but it was particularly hard when he thought he was making it completely simple.