by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
But then came a new complication: Olga fell ill. There was a sore spot on her stomach, and she booked in for an X-ray. She was worried about the cost of the medical visits and treatments, however, so when the doctor wrote her an expensive prescription, she ignored it and went to a homeopathic medicine man. Surely it would soon get better—but in the meantime, things were ‘very bad in terms of my mood, and so it’s a blessing that nobody from my nearest and dearest is around. I don’t know how to put up with being sick with elegance—I mean spiritual elegance.’
It turned out that she had to have an operation. ‘I was bleeding uninterruptedly for almost a month and waited to go to a doctor until it stopped. Some days it was so strong that I could scarcely stand.’ When she finally did go to the doctor, he insisted on putting her in hospital; ‘it would have been better to put it off’, as she wrote to Mischka, ‘[but] I have to let them cut my belly open, and better soon than later. I have already made arrangements with the butcher and now am just waiting for some money that should come through in a few days.’ The operation took place in the Herz-Jesu Hospital in Fulda around the third week in June, and she expected to be in hospital eleven days. She woke up from the operation hearing snatches of Beethoven and thinking it was her son Arpad bending over her. As she reported to Mischka and Helga, ‘the scar is over the whole belly. I think he must have pulled my entire innards out …’
Not only was this operation incredibly badly timed, since she was likely to be summoned for emigration any day, but it was also a major blow financially. Olga had been trying to save up to cover departure expenses, but all that was gone, and Mischka was called on for an urgent contribution. Even that didn’t cover all expenses for the hospital stay and medical treatment, and Olga had to persuade the surgeon to allow her to send the final payment later from America.
Her summons to the transit camp in Butzbach (north of Frankfurt, about 100 kilometres from Fulda by road) must have come not long after she got out of hospital, or conceivably even earlier. She was in Butzbach by 31 July, arriving by train and then walking to the camp. On the way, she sat down on a hillside overlooking the forest and remembered how seven years ago (surely six, in fact) she had sat on just such a hill in Gotenhafen and looked over the sea to Sweden, where she wrongly thought her sons Arpad and Jan had found refuge: ‘Today I have nothing to look for.’ She was ‘miserable as a dog’, she wrote to Mischka. ‘I don’t know why I have to go to America. And yet I am going to do it. Without inner conviction but out of some kind of [illegible word—Muk?]’. Perhaps it’s appropriate that that key word is illegible. Was it courage (German Mut) that was driving her on? Or torment (Russian muka)? Or something between fatalism and a stubborn determination to finish something she had started?
Before embarkation she spent a couple of months based in Butzbach in a remarkable whirl of activity. She seems to have been almost constantly on the road, attending to urgent business, and wondering why, in her life, everything always had to be done at the last minute. Fortunately, her health held up, so that she could write bravely to Mischka in mid September that
the stomach wound has healed well and peace reigns in my intestines. Now fortunately there is no discharge. The only thing is that my resources are at this moment only half a [Deutsch]Mark. It’s also a bother that I have to travel so soon after such an operation … Things are better with me again. Who could take this joke [i.e. the illness and operation] seriously!
One set of last-minute business was of a legal and financial character, some of it evidently connected with the settling of affairs with regard to Mirkin’s house in Fulda. The outcome as well as the substance of the matter (or matters) are unclear: in an undated letter probably written in August, she rejoiced that after ‘endless correspondence’ between Fulda, Kassel and Frankfurt (where the lawyer was), the affair had been settled in her favour and ‘I have finally become rich’. But evidently she spoke too soon, since the next month there are references to ‘my Kassel disappointment’ and the fact that Helga’s mother had been kind enough to offer her a loan, ‘which I accepted with great relief’. In any case, it’s clear that with regard to the business matters, she left a lot of loose ends still dangling, which Mischka and Helga had to tidy up after her departure.
Some of her pressing business was related to emigration. Despite her efforts to postpone it, she had to go through medical inspection in August; rather surprisingly—you would think a recent major operation might have hit alarm bells—this went without a hitch. She was running around various local and American commissions and the Fulda police collecting and delivering documents. And on top of that, she was constantly trying to find time to get to Heidelberg for a final visit, though it looks as if she never managed it.
The most remarkable aspect of Olga’s departure was that in these last months in Germany, her activity as a religious sculptor suddenly went into high gear. In mid September, she wrote to Mischka that with perhaps two weeks remaining before her departure, she had begun some sculptural work for the church in Fulda and was now trying desperately to finish it. If only the priest would let her work late into the night, but unfortunately he slept just above the church cellar in which she worked. So she was having to stay on for some extra days but hoped to be able to leave on 22 September. ‘You can imagine that I absolutely must finish my big “Work”.’ Art experts, including the sculptor Richard Maur, with whom she had had some contact back in Riga in the 1920s, had come to see her figurines, notably a St Antony holding the Child Jesus in his arms, and praised them. Olga was pleased by their positive reactions, but even more (she said) by the fact that when she told Maur that she had described herself to fellow Latvian DPs as his pupil, which was not strictly true, he had said she had every right to do so and he would be glad to be seen as her teacher.
Mischka was drawn into the last-minute appraisal of Olga’s figurines too, and sent a remarkably detailed critique, noting a fault in one of the pleats in St Antony’s sleeve and that the Child’s face was too grown-up for his body. Olga was still working hard, especially on the Child (she had sculpted him naked but was now, perhaps in response to Maur’s suggestions, clothing him). On the eve of her departure for the embarkation camp, she was thinking almost exclusively about her sculptures, dashing off a note to Mischka and Helga defending her vision of the Child as ageless in terms of Catholic tradition. She was sending the figurines (evidently St Antony and the Child) to them in Heidelberg and regretted that she couldn’t send them her Holy Family as well—they would find Joseph ‘particularly amusing’, she thought; the figure was a bit stiff, but she was just going to have to leave him like that. ‘Despite all the mistakes … I am satisfied in the highest degree that I have made him.’ In a final postcard sent off the next morning, she was still obsessing about the sculptures, tormented on her last night by dreams that she had done St Antony’s pleats wrong.
She had received her embarkation notice on 13 September (‘the thirteenth: is that a lucky or unlucky number?’), with instructions that she would be departing in eight days. Meanwhile, there was another mishap: she fell when getting out of the train in Butzbach and injured her leg. She hoped this would get her an extension, and indeed she was able to add in a postscript: ‘Extension until 28 September. On the way to Frankfurt. Oh-oh-oh-oh! Such anxiety!!!’
Olga’s actual embarkation date was Sunday 22 October 1950, so her ship’s sailing date was probably postponed at the last minute. The next we hear from her is a letter from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean en route to New York giving a rather harrowing, though unself-pitying, account of the trip. She was on a troop ship filled with DPs, allocated a top bunk— just under the light and the ventilation, which Olga reports as a positive—in a corner in a hall accommodating 500 people in tiers. The IRO had given each passenger $1.50 to spend at the PX on board, and Olga had used it to get stamps to send her letter from Halifax, their first North American stop. Shipboard conditions were obviously awful, with fetid air, and pushing and shoving at m
eals, and vomit in the gangways. On deck, there were seats for only about fifty people; when it rained, the only shelter was under the lifeboats that were hanging up. Nevertheless, after a terrible twenty-four hours of intense seasickness during a storm in mid-ocean, Olga spent most of her time there, if not lying and writing in her bunk: ‘I always stand at the railing or—if it is frosty, sit on the rolled-up rope ladders and look for hours at the water and the sky,’ wearing two jackets and her fur coat.
As the ship approached New York, the passengers were allowed to stay on deck all night to get a first sight of the city, but Olga went to bed, rising on 1 November at four—half an hour before breakfast—to see the Statue of Liberty—or rather, not to see it, since it was obscured by ‘night and cloud’. It took an hour for the tugs to pull them in, in which time New York’s skyscrapers became visible. She was one of the first through medical control, and as she was waiting for immigration to open, Mirkin appeared. He had promised to meet the ship, but still it was a big relief to see him—‘he didn’t look so ugly any more’, as she commented in her report of the arrival sent to Germany. She didn’t enjoy it, however, when he insisted on parading her before the crowd of reporters and photographers gathered to write their DP stories. Instructing her to leave the talking to him, ‘Mirkin gave them a whole novel (Roman)’ about her and their past connection, Olga wrote wryly to Mischka and Helga. This is how the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported Mirkin’s story:
A 29-year-old Jewish refugee paid a debt of gratitude to a Christian woman who sheltered and befriended him when the Nazis overran his native Latvia.
The story began in Latvia in 1941.
Simon Mirkin, his young sister and their parents were clapped into a German slave labor camp for Jews near Riga. During a trip to Riga on a labor project, Mirkin met Mrs. Olga Danos, 44, Russian Orthodox, who made her living as a dressmaker for the wives of Nazi officials.
Mirkin said that, through a bribe, Mrs. Danos arranged for him and his family to live with her. They were released from camp and made their home with the dressmaker for two years.
After the war Mirkin married and came to the United States. But he never forgot his benefactress. Today, Mrs. Danos arrived by ship as a displaced person—sponsored by the Mirkins, with who [sic] she will live.
‘I want to return to her just a little of what she had given me by helping her to start in the United States,’ Mirkin said after greeting Mrs. Danos at the pier.
This was indeed a touching and uplifting story, though perhaps one shouldn’t take it too literally, given Olga’s comment on Mirkin’s ‘novel’. Since the Danos family knew very few details about Olga’s activity saving Jews, I had always hoped that if I could ever track down some Mirkin descendants, they would know. And finally I did track down Barry Mirkin, thanks to Olga’s noting the name of the toddler who damaged one of her letters to Mischka shortly after her arrival in New York. He did indeed know about Olga and how grateful his father, recently deceased, had been to her for saving him. He sent me the press cutting and the photo of the two of them together on her arrival. In crossing emails, each of us eagerly asked the other for details about exactly what had happened in Riga and just how Olga had saved Mirkin and other Jews. Alas, neither of us knew. Now, I suppose, nobody ever will.
12
Mischka’s Departure
Departure, 1951. Mischka (in hat, third from left) and Helga (in coat with fur collar) are sitting on their luggage waiting to depart, probably from Bremerhaven, for New York.
MISCHKA’S and Olga’s relations were necessarily different after his marriage to Helga. ‘Perhaps I write less often now,’ she wrote to Mischka some months after the marriage, ‘but it is because I know that you won’t miss it. You also know what my attitude to you is, how happy I am about that [presumably the fact that he was no longer alone].’ This clearly represented the ‘pulling back’ that she had privately decided upon—distancing herself from him, but in such a way that he wouldn’t notice. Whether Mischka noticed or not, he was at pains to convey his own belief that when people talk about ‘losing a son through marriage’, they are thinking of situations when the connection is in any case weak or onesided, whereas in the case of himself and Olga, ‘it is superfluous to explain that [the connection] has only increased over the course of the last twenty years’.
After the marriage, Olga was careful to include a special message for Helga (Helgalein) in her letters. Initially a bit artificial because they didn’t know each other well, the tone became increasingly relaxed. Some of Olga’s communications with Helga were practical, like her instructions on how to make the Russian paskha, of which Mischka was so fond. Increasingly often, Olga addressed her letters to both of them—‘Dear gang’, ‘Dear children’, ‘My dear little family’. Once Olga was in the United States, according to the normal pattern of young married couples writing family letters, Helga became as frequent a correspondent as Mischka. Olga usually signed off as ‘Your Mother’ or ‘Your Ma’ (‘Mi’ and ‘Ma’ had become the standard usage in Mischka’s and Olga’s correspondence), while Helga wrote to her as ‘My dear Mama’. Olga also established good relations with Helga’s parents, Willy and Martha Heimers, whom she evidently visited in Hanover on more than one occasion: after getting out of hospital in July 1950 and in the throes of hectic preparations for departure, she wrote to Martha imagining herself ‘in my favourite chair under your lamp, in Willy’s peaceful presence and with your always friendly face nearby’.
While Olga was clearly fond of Helga, and apparently vice versa, she remained uneasy about whether Helga really knew what kind of man she had married. Just after her arrival in New York, she wrote anxiously:
Living with Mi is particularly difficult, dear Helga. He is an exceptional man. What kind of talent is in him he himself did not realise for a long time. I think he doubts sometimes if he can absolutely do something. He doesn’t belong to those with a well-balanced nature, who systematically work towards a goal, cool and considered. He is a pure artist (his science is pure art) and, as such, sensitive, subject to moods, eruptively creative. He needs a wife who believes in him and his abilities, even when they are apparently not at their top, to keep him in good shape. It lies in your hands to give the world a great man … That you have a fine sensitivity for various things I have observed several times with great satisfaction. Mi has told me that you have above the average capacity for loyalty (which is only a gift of the heart). But whether you have correctly recognised Mi’s great, rooted and deeply hidden talents—that I don’t know. Whether you will train in yourself that strength to become his spiritual torch I also don’t know. But I believe it because you are sensitive and have the gift of love.
Helga didn’t see Mischka the same way Olga did. It was the man who interested her, not the scientist, and she thought Olga’s emphasis on his genius overblown. (Olga was the same about Daniel Kolz, Helga told me: she thought both of them were bound to be the equivalent of Nobel Prize winners.) In the two years that Helga and Mischka lived together in Heidelberg, learning to function as a couple and play the wife and husband roles were major preoccupations. Mischka even took to describing his domestic environment in some detail in his letters to his mother, albeit with a certain self-consciousness. After he and Helga moved in November 1949 to a new and slightly larger apartment on Rohrbacher Street, he described how they had removed the pictures provided by the landlady and hidden them behind the cupboard, as well as hanging a curtain across one corner of the room and putting an artistic arrangement of branches gathered in the forest in front of it: ‘now it is really pleasant’. ‘There are signs that our married state is making progress,’ he wrote to Olga. ‘We have even got somewhat used to the fact that in public we properly belong together. Only the “Frau Danos” is still always a bit strange ‘Frau Danos’ was, of course, a name that had hitherto belonged only to Olga.
Mischka was no longer formally a DP, having gone off IRO maintenance and ‘on to the German economy’ when he moved
to Heidelberg and started earning a salary. He was now living like a German—or a German bourgeois, to quote his own description of a ‘leisurely bourgeois Sunday’ (but note the tongue-in-cheek reference to their late rising, surely not a German bourgeois habit):
After we had got up at 11 or 12 and eaten lunch, we had to hurry not to miss the performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis that began at 4. That’s why we got up so early … Then we came home and made ourselves comfortable; we made cocoa and wanted to hear the broadcast of a symphony concert from Stuttgart when suddenly the power went off and we sat for an hour in the dark (by candlelight).
Quite uncharacteristically for Mischka, clothes became a topic in his letters of 1949–50, with much correspondence about the making of a corduroy suit. He felt that he and Helga had made a good showing at a little party at the institute to which wives were invited, noting, however, that this was no surprise: ‘We had expected nothing less than to be the best-dressed family, at least with regard to the feminine part.’