by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
In fact, the Danoses had quite a skewed understanding of the American debate, or at least one very different from contemporary historians. They assumed that the concern in the United States was about admitting Nazis into the country. Actually this seems to have been only a minor and peripheral issue. With the United States now in the grip of the almost hysterical anti-Communism associated with the Cold War and McCarthyism, the real concern was about letting in Communists. The man behind the Internal Security Act of September 1950, Senator McCarran, was a crusading anti-Communist. Olga and Mischka were right in thinking that it was only a matter of time before the exclusions of members of Nazi affiliates were revoked, since McCarran and his allies in Congress had no investment in banning them. What held things up for months, however, was unwillingness to make the same revocation with regard to Soviet Communism, plus a degree of racially based distaste for admitting the Jews and Slavs, especially ex-Soviet Russians, who were commonly suspected of Communist sympathies.
But none of this was important to Mischka at the time: his aim was to get to the United States, and this was an obstacle in the way that had to be overcome. Indeed, it was certainly time to get moving if he was going to leave. By mid 1951, when Mischka was still waiting for embarkation news, almost one million DPs had already departed for resettlement. The 1949 DP Act was about to expire in the United States, the IRO was soon to close down, and the DPs still left in Europe were panicking: ‘The final rush … saw long lines winding through the camps. Some DPs were carried on stretchers. All clung to precious documents as they desperately tried to get papers approved before the end of 1951 Mischka had left it to the last minute. At the time of his PhD defence, they had still heard nothing definite from the IRO, and Helga—though not Mischka—was ready to give up the whole idea of emigrating.
The crucial resettlement letter from the IRO arrived in March 1951, instructing them on the steps they must take ‘before you leave for your new home in the USA’. They had to register with the Resettlement Office in Mannheim, submit all documents within fourteen days, go through medical inspection and then ‘wait to be assigned transport’. That made departure seem very close. Helga and Mischka began to worry about packing and whether they could take their ‘beautiful big down quilt’ with them, despite prohibitions on import of anything containing feathers (with typical disdain for formal rules, Olga assured them that there would be no problem—‘Mirkin will be meeting you, so the controller will not be strict’).
Then things started to go into slow motion. In mid May, with all their papers in, including an attestation from the Heidelberg police that they had no criminal records, they had still not been called for medical inspection. Mischka’s job with Haxel ran out at the end of June, but in mid July they were still waiting, finally being informed that what was delaying their case was a bureaucratic complication: they were departing from the American zone, but Mischka’s DP registration had been in the British. Still, they had now at least been assigned a number for their departure. A last screening (political checking) took place in late August.
Finally, in mid October, they were cleared for departure and told to return to Ludwigsburg with luggage for embarkation on the next transport to the United States. (The US processing officer who signed this document was Ruth Adams: I like to think, though with no proof, that this was the Ruth Adams I knew later in Chicago, longtime activist editor of the anti-nuclear Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to which Misha in his later incarnation was a subscriber.) They sailed out of Bremerhaven on the General Ballou on 3 November. Their cohort of departing DPs—those who left in the second half of 1951—was both the smallest since mass resettlement had begun in mid 1947 and the last that the IRO would ever record. The DP resettlement process was essentially over, and the IRO itself was on the point of disbanding. Left behind in Central Europe were around a hundred thousand DPs who, because of age or illness, couldn’t be resettled, plus a somewhat smaller number who, like Mischka and Olga, had found employment in the German economy but, unlike them, had decided to remain.
The General Ballou, a former troop ship like the one Olga had sailed on the previous year, was carrying 1126 DPs to New York, along with twenty-eight ethnic Germans, sixteen individual migrants and two repatriating Americans. It came direct from Korea, adding to the sense of a world on the brink of war. The voyage, according to Helga, was nightmarish. Women and men slept on different decks (women on the fourth of five), some in three-tiered bunks and others swinging around in four-tiered hammocks, with hundreds together in the same hall. Helga at first got a hammock but later managed to move to a bunk. Although she and Mischka were not seasick, practically everyone else was, with the predictable messy consequences. Helga was not only revolted but disapproving. It was mainly a psychological effect, she thought: one person would start throwing up over the railing and then everyone else would follow suit. Meals were the worst. In the first place, there was the strange American food served—almost no sauerkraut, pickled cucumber or herring. But then there was the problem of one’s neighbours at table:
They are almost without exception very primitive and dirty people, and Germany can be happy to have been able to get rid of many thousands of these sorts to America. The people are often so impertinent and undisciplined that you can sometimes scarcely bear it. When for example during the meal someone sitting opposite you throws up, it takes a lot of energy and self-control to take the plate and move to the next nearest table to sit and keep on eating …
Encountering DPs en masse was a shock to the gently brought up Helga. Some of them (Ukrainians and Russians) were illiterate, and as for the rest, particularly the Poles, ‘it is unimaginable how low the level of these people is’. It provoked Helga—for the first time, she said—to feel real prejudice against certain ethnic groups. The Jews on board were irritating because of their aggressive sense of superiority and entitlement. The Poles treated their children badly and ‘are frightfully primitive; neither they nor their children undress at night, and 70% of the people on this ship have still not bathed a single time during our trip. You can probably imagine how badly these people stink. Moreover, there are enough showers with running hot water available.’ It was altogether a great relief to arrive in New York on 14 November 1951 and be met by the dutiful Mirkin.
Mischka wrote a postscript to Helga’s fourteen-page letter to her family—the longest she ever wrote—but his concerns were completely different. To be sure, it was nice to encounter clean lavatories in America, with liquid soap and paper towels provided free, but Mischka mentioned them only in passing in the context of praising Americans for being very well dressed, ‘even the toilet lady’. His main point, however, was such typical Misha that I had to laugh, remembering how on our walks together I would notice people and he only technology. He wanted his in-laws to appreciate the oddness of New York traffic engineering, with freeways running over ordinary streets and houses:
Outside and above the window runs a street [freeway]. One truck after the other goes by on the snow. Under that, which is at a height of one storey, is the real street. When one wants to get off [the freeway], one must take an exit. Then one finds oneself on the actual street.
So this was New York. They had taken the exit onto a new life.
Afterword
Olga on her land in Florida, mid 1950s.
‘We made it!’ That was what Misha would always say, with a note of gleeful satisfaction and even triumph, after we had run for a bus or landed safely in a plane, or sometimes just as we sat down to dinner together after coping with the vicissitudes of the day. I loved this phrase. It made our life together a series of little successes, not to mention the big, astonishing success of the marriage itself.
So that’s how I imagine him feeling when he arrived in New York to start a new life, liberated from the miseries and uncertainties of the old one. Indeed, that is exactly how he described it to me, except that he didn’t say, ‘when I arrived in New York’ but ‘when I went to Columbia’ (m
eaning Columbia University in New York). In his story, ‘going to Columbia’ was a wonderful moment of liberation and relief, with physics and eating ice-cream in the sun beside the Hudson River fused in his memory. Columbia was the proper place for him to be in, the one that his life’s trajectory required. (In talking to me, Misha would use the Russian word zakonomerno, meaning ‘fitting the pattern established by underlying laws’; the Germans have a word for this too, but English doesn’t.) Columbia University in New York was the next stage in that natural progression that had brought him from the Radio Club in Riga to Dresden, Hanover, Heidelberg and finally to New York. Columbia, with Isidor Rabi and Charles Townes as its current eminences, was one of the leading New World centres of nuclear physics.
Columbia appeared so immediately in Misha’s arrival tale that he might have gone there straight from the boat. The arrival story he told me contained no other information except an affectionate mention of the Danoses’ apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up under the El in the Bronx, and a rather horrifying account of piloting a small seaplane, rented by a friend, underneath the George Washington Bridge on the Hudson River, for a lark, despite not having learnt to fly. The point of this anecdote, which Misha related with pleasure, was that technical processes like flying a plane can be easily grasped by watching for a while. I gather from it that part of the new life was recovering a feeling of invulnerability.
It was a surprise, therefore, to hear a very different story of the arrival in New York from Helga. She said that at first Misha (now Mike to much of the world) had no job or affiliation in New York, wandering aimlessly around the city streets for almost a year, while Helga slaved away at uncongenial office jobs to support them. It was only when Jensen, arriving on an American visit, read Misha the riot act for exploiting Helga and fixed him up with a postdoc with Townes that Columbia came into the picture. That is partially but not fully confirmed by Misha’s own CVs, which date his employment at Columbia from March 1952—in other words, four months after his arrival.
There was supposed to be a job for Misha when he arrived, but it fell through. The American Committee for Emigre Scholars, Writers and Artists, prompted by Olga, had arranged it, and on the basis of her letters to Misha, it always looked dicey to me. Of course, Misha had signed up with the IRO for university positions, and Olga, in her enthusiasm, even imagined that a professorial position might come through for such a distinguished immigrant. But that was a very long shot and never came to anything. In fact, what the committee thought it had on offer was a job as an engineer in New Jersey, based on Misha’s Hanover degree. In any case, no job eventuated. After an interlude of however long it actually was, four months or fourteen, Misha got a postdoc at Columbia, which he held until 1954. In that year, he took a position as a researcher in theoretical nuclear physics at the US government’s National Bureau of Standards (later, National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, where he remained based for more than forty years.
So, give or take a few months of unemployment and demoralisation, we made it! still applies as far as Misha was concerned. He was back on dry land, with a road and a destination before him.
For Olga, it wasn’t so straightforward. She was in her mid fifties, as against Misha’s twenty-nine. She hadn’t wanted to come to the United States, and for her there was no Columbia to serve as a mecca. Her American diary—kept in a different notebook from the ‘book of my marriage’, which ended in 1948—reveals a lot of misery and carries a note of bitterness and cynicism absent in the earlier volume. You have to be a commodity in America, was her assumption, and the question starkly posed was: ‘To whom shall I sell myself?’ To a man with money was the first answer that came to mind, and there is an entertaining discussion in the diary of how one might go about the process: ‘If you sell yourself as a servant, you ask the bosses for a recommendation. From earlier positions where you have served. Do you perhaps need recommendations from former lovers for this other kind of service?’
None of Olga’s current admirers fitted the bill. One of them had money and professed devotion but was married and was never going to leave his wife. Another admirer, back in Europe, had astonished her by sending ‘a desperate and quite open-hearted love letter’ after she left, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have married him even if he had had money. Where, if anywhere, the ‘good Nazi’ Seeliger fitted in was unclear. In an affectionate letter to Olga from ‘Your little bear’ in April 1952, he talked about his dream of going to America so that ‘one day I’ll be waiting at your door in a Cadillac, as it was once in Riga when I came from the front’. If this was a suggestion that she should sponsor his immigration, Olga seems not to have obliged.
My sense of these diary entries is that Olga may have been semi-serious about finding a man with money to marry, but she was also expressing both her sense of what life in America demanded and a degree of instinctive revulsion from it. When she did actually marry, it was not for money or worldly advantage. Her choice was a Japanese butler in the Florida household of the Maytags, the washing-machine millionaires. Tadasu Okada, perhaps an artist in another life, is remembered by Helga as a kind and gentle man; his letters to Misha, whom he called Michika, are affectionate and seemingly naive, but this may be an artefact of his English. Olga came to know him because she herself was working for the Maytags as their housekeeper. This choice of employment was part of Olga’s semi-defiant reaction to immigration: on arrival, she only half-heartedly tried to get the kind of culture-oriented, white-collar jobs like translation that someone of her background would be expected to go for, but instead went into domestic service. Her first jobs were as a cleaner, so the job with the Maytags (whom she seems to have liked) was a step up.
After leaving the Maytags, Olga made several efforts to set herself up in business as a maker of garden furniture (using her experience as a sculptor), and on the basis of the published record—an interview-based article in the Miami Herald—would appear to have made a success of it. But I am a bit doubtful of this article, probably written as a PR exercise by one of Olga’s American admirers. According to the diary, the first business collapsed, and she was only tentatively embarking on a new one in the months before her death in 1956. The main efforts were put into acquiring a plot of land in Homestead, Florida, and with Tadu’s perhaps unwilling help—‘he has never worked so hard or so much in his life’—clearing and planting it. (Who knew that she had agricultural skills, miller’s daughter though she was? But perhaps she was just making it up as she went along.) She saw the property as something for her sons, particularly the two left behind, writing that ‘I connect this property with the remnants of the hope that still sometime things will come good for my suffering children in Riga’.
After Misha and Helga’s arrival, the three of them lived together for about a year. At close quarters, Olga’s lifestyle was a bit much for Helga—she was untidy and unpredictable, likely to go off for a weekend without explanation, Helga remembered. The crisis came when Olga’s Fulda protégé, Daniel Kolz, finally arrived in New York, evidently having abandoned his Parisian plans, and Olga thought he should live with them, at least at first. But it turned out that Helga felt differently. From her point of view, the Bronx place was her and Misha’s home, and she was strongly opposed to Kolz moving in. So Olga moved out, abruptly and after a big blow-up, and never came back. Her diary conveys a strikingly clear-sighted understanding of Helga’s problems with her: ‘I am too different from her mother, from her sense of what a 60-year-old woman ought to be. She cannot respect me, indeed from time to time she despises me. On top of that, she thinks I influence Mi and that offends her.’ Olga understood how ‘hard for both of them’ (Helga and Misha) the night of the quarrel had been. Still, after that night, ‘I wanted at all costs not to be in the house, which suddenly was not my “home”.’
The parting of ways with Misha was painful. In her diary, remembering the ‘black-haired lad’ she had given birth to thirty
-one years before, she wrote sadly that ‘a wall has been going up between us, slowly but surely’, and now ‘I have run away from the black-haired lad, the only one left to me’. This was her first diary entry after her move to Florida, where she remained until her death from liver cancer three years later. They corresponded, but Misha wrote rarely, and Olga started to feel that her own letters were a burden to him. She imagined the scene in the Bronx, where ‘Helga will say to him in her nice little-child voice, “Misha, you really must write to your mother,” and Mi will look guilty and make his boyish grimace and rather unhappily wonder what he can write to me about.’