by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
The worst moments were when something in the documents made me critical of Mischka. For example, I wasn’t too keen on the way he wrote about women or treated Nanni; I didn’t think much of his national stereotyping; and there were some rather loud silences about the Jewish question and Nazism. If he were alive, I could either have expressed these criticisms and heard his response or kept quiet about them. With him being dead and unable to respond, it’s all a lot stickier. I hate the idea of anyone else criticising him. But at the same time, I couldn’t help putting it all out there so that they could, if so inclined. The historian’s Hippocratic oath, as far as I am concerned, is ‘don’t leave things out because you don’t like them’. I seemed unable to break this, even for Misha. Not that he would have wanted me to. I was an experimentalist in his definition, and experimentalists aren’t meant to ignore data.
The big worry was whether writing about his life as I have done was a kind of betrayal. I would wake up in the middle of the night with the anguished thought that, in some particular passage, I should be protecting him more. Along with that went another, contradictory fear, also capable of waking me up in the early hours: that in such and such a paragraph, I was protecting him and shouldn’t be. I got used to getting up in the morning and removing the offending paragraph that had unduly/insufficiently protected him.
This was originally meant to be a book about Mischka’s life as a displaced person, but I soon saw that it was really a story about Olga as well. The two of them went through similar experiences, but I became fascinated by the way similar experiences meant quite different things for a young man with a future and for a middle-aged woman with just the past. Ever since I first read Olga’s American diary, the stark contrast between her reactions to the new life and Misha’s was on my mind. I became very fond of Olga, about whom at the beginning I knew little. Towards the end, I started to wonder if, with her more spontaneous and exuberant writing style and flamboyant personality, she was hijacking my Mischka book. I decided that even if she was, I would let her.
So the book that was meant to be a celebration of Misha turns out to be a celebration of Olga as well, and of the exceptional closeness and mutual support that existed between them in the years in Germany. The closeness didn’t fully survive the move to the States, or at least went into temporary eclipse, which became permanent on her unexpectedly early death. Misha didn’t talk about that eclipse, but I think it was part of his sense of loss and pain about the past. There may be things in this book about Mischka that would make Misha wince, as we all tend to do when confronted by our younger selves. But I think he would be glad to see Olga back with him on centre stage. In Misha’s original We made it mantra, she was the other half. They made it through together.
Notes
Introduction
The Anti-Death League
This is a farcical creation of Kingsley Amis in his 1966 novel of the same name, set in an army camp somewhere in England. All who are against death are invited to join the league, which, however, appears to be non-existent.
Memoir of Australian childhood
This is Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010).
‘Writing not just to record but also to communicate’
Misha wrote several musings about how to read his musings. He copied letters he wrote that he considered particularly important into his diary. And in the longest of all his diary entries, on the Dresden bombing of February 1945, he breaks off the narrative in the middle to talk about the problems of getting one’s point across to a listener. Thanks to my German translator, Diana Weekes, for pointing this out, and to Mark McKenna for asking the question.
Chapter 1: Family
My principal sources on the Danos family background are my interviews with Jan Danos and Arpad Danos, Kata Bohus’s research, the musing ‘Stories from my Grandfather’s Times’, some fragments in Olga’s papers, Arpad’s school records, and letters from Arpad Danos and Ivan Danos on the Deutsch/Danos family in Hungary (details in Sources).
End of serfdom
Misha’s musing implies that his serf ancestors were emancipated in 1861, which is the date for the Russian Empire in general. But in most of Latvia, serfs were emancipated forty years earlier, following a model of Prussian reform. Misha’s dating may be simply a mistake, but it could be that Julia’s forebears came from a part of Latvia where emancipation came late.
Historical background and population statistics on Latvia
These are largely drawn from Daina Bleiere et al., History of Latvia: The Twentieth Century (Riga: Jumava, 2006). Quotation on Riga’s transformation is on p. 53.
Deutsch/Danos name change
At least one other probably Jewish family in Budapest changed its name from Deutsch to Danos at the turn of the century (email correspondence with Jonathan Danos circa 2007), and several Hungarian Danoses are Jewish and have left Holocaust memoirs. According to Kata Bohus, it was more common for Jews than for Germans in Hungary to obey the edict on name change.
Disappearance of Olga’s father
Misha’s version says he was never heard from again. In an undated autobiographical fragment written in English (3/29), Olga writes in the context of the First World War that ‘my father was killed’, but given the fallibility of her English, she may just have meant he was dead. In any case, it suggests that the family had some news of his fate.
Olga’s first marriage
Olga appears to have told the children when they were young that it was an engagement, not a marriage. But Jan says that when he and Arpad Jr left Riga for Kurland in 1944, hoping to escape from the imminent Soviet reoccupation, Olga told them, in case they never met again, that it was a marriage. (Misha, being already outside Latvia, evidently missed this correction.)
Arpad’s singing voice
His sons identified him as a tenor, although a review in Riga’s Russian newspaper Segodnia (16 May 1920) describes him as ‘a lyrical voice of soft timbre, even one might say of baritone colouration’. Thanks to Livija Baumane-Andrejevska of Riga for sending me this review.
Chapter 2: Childhood
Principal sources for this chapter are Olga’s and Misha’s diaries, interviews with Jan and Arpad Danos, and (on Olga’s fashion atelelier) Līvija Baumane’s essay.
Separation of parents
Jan Danos dates this to the mid 1930s, which is also what Misha told me and Helga remembers him telling her. However, Olga’s diary for 2 March 1944 unambiguously states that ‘On 13 June 1943 I left my husband. I live alone in my workshop.’
Lovers
The mention of the lover is in her diary entry of 2 April 1948, on her husband’s death. There are also references in 1940s entries to her husband’s jealousy, and a postwar letter from Paul Seeliger, a German official in wartime Riga well known to the Danoses, suggests that an intimate relationship had existed between them at some point.
‘Home to the Reich’
About fifty-one thousand Germans left in the first wave in 1939, leaving about ten thousand Germans in Latvia, most of whom left early in 1940 after the country’s annexation by the Soviet Union. History of Latvia, p. 218.
‘Cannon fodder for Adolf’
This is Jan Danos’s quotation of his father, in an interview with me on 8 September 2006.
Chapter 3: Riga under the Soviets
Principal sources for this chapter are the musings ‘Plebiscite to Join the Union’, ‘VEF’ and ‘Mass Deportations in ‘41’, as well as those on socialism and the Soviet Union; Misha’s diaries; interviews with Helen Machen; and Līvija Baumane’s essay.
June 1941 deportations
See Björn M. Felder, Lettland im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), pp. 153–61. The report dated 17 May 1941 that apparently anticipates the event is published in Russian as ‘Spetssoobshchenie V.N. Merkulov I. V. Stalinu ob itogakh operatsii po arestu i vyseleniiu “antisovetskikh elementov”
iz pribaltiiskikh respublik 17 maia 1941 g.’, in Lubianka: Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR ‘Smersh’ 1939-mart 1946 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 2006), pp. 279–81.
Russia replaces Germany as Latvia’s ‘primary enemy’
The quotation is from History of Latvia, p. 260.
Ariadna’s deportation
Misha remembered Ufa as the destination, but an article on Ariadna’s father, Professor Paul Sakss, says it was Vorkuta (Valdemārs Karkliņš, ‘Brīnišķīgs ceļojums’, Latviu mūsika I Latvian Music, no. 18, 1988, p. 1905). Thanks to Dailonis Stauvers for supplying me with a copy.
Soviet everyday
The book referred to is Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Chapter 4: Riga under the Germans
The chapter draws on my interview with Bičevskis’; the musings on ‘Nazi Latvia’, ‘Saving Jews’, ‘Mass Graves’ and ‘Koelln and Seeliger’; and Mischka’s ‘Rittergut’ document. On Olga’s and Mary’s saving of Jews, additional sources are emails from Barry Mirkin and Margers Vestermanis; the Spokane Daily Chronicle report on Mirkin and Olga (1 November 1950); and Olga’s interview with the Miami Herald (27 June 1954).
German attack on Riga, 1941
A four-pronged assault on Latvia, including one direction towards Riga, was part of the initial German assault on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941. By 8 July, the German Army had occupied the entire territory of Latvia. History of Latvia, pp. 263–4.
Ice hockey
According to Latvian sports historian Andris Zeļenkovs, Misha played in the LSB-2 and US-2 teams in 1939–40, the latter being the university’s second team.
German policy towards Latvia
From July 1941, Latvia was ruled by the Reich through Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium die besetzten Ostgebiete), but its administration, based in Riga, was Latvian under German supervision. There was even talk about future extension of Latvian autonomy, especially in cultural matters. History of Latvia, pp. 267–8, 272–3.
Riga ghetto
The move of Riga’s Jews to the Riga ghetto was completed on 25 October 1941. Jews were being exterminated in Latvia’s smaller towns throughout the autumn, but it was late in November that the mass killing of Jews from the Riga ghetto began. By mid December, about twenty-five thousand Riga Jews had been killed and buried in pits in the Rumbula Forest, leaving about six thousand Jews alive in Latvia. Trainloads of Jews from Germany and Austria were then brought in and accommodated in the Riga ghetto, most of them to be killed in their turn. History of Latvia, pp. 278, 282–4. For a more detailed account, see Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia 1941–1944 (Washington, DC: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996).
Saving Jews
Latvian historian Margers Vestermanis has compiled a list of 420 Latvians who saved Jews: Vestermanis, Juden in Riga (1995) and email of 16 August 2015. This is an ongoing project, and we have been in communication about adding Mary Sakss and Olga Danos to the list. The date of Mary’s arrest—21 October 2015—was kindly supplied by Dr Vestermanis.
For accounts of how individual Jews from the ghetto were saved by being assigned to work for Latvian businesses in the city (usually tailoring shops, like Olga’s) and staying overnight on the premises when execution round-ups were imminent, as well as ‘vanishing’ from the convoy taking them from the ghetto to work in the city and back, see Bernard Press, The Murder of the Jews in Latvia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), and the testimony of David Silberman and Lev Aronov in Gertrude Schneider (ed.), Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember (New York: Philosophical Library, 1987).
Olga’s relations with Seeliger
See ‘Lovers’ in the notes to chapter 2, above.
Baltic-German wartime university exchange
Detailed information is in Margot Blank, Nationalsozialistische Hochschulpolitik in Riga (1941 bis 1944): Konzeption und Realität eines Bereiches deutscher Besatzungspolitik (Lüneberg: Verlag Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1991), pp. 64–73.
Chapter 5: Wartime Germany
The principal sources for this chapter are correspondence between Misha in Germany and Olga in Riga; Olga’s diary; the letter to Olga from ‘Der Alte’; the musings ‘Medical Experimentations’ and ‘Cleansing of Concepts: Informers vs denouncers in Nazi, Soviet, DDR’; interviews with Jan Danos, Arpad Danos, Helen Machen and Mrs Wally Ayers; and letters to Mischka from Waldtraut Herrnberger, including her ‘Verpflichtung’.
Dick Whittington
Misha’s oral account of his travels had a folkloric ring. I don’t remember if he knew or invoked the English Dick Whittington story, but a possible German parallel is the youth sent off into the wide world by his miller father in Joseph von Eichendroff’s early nineteenth-century Aus der Leben eines Taugenichts. Thanks to Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus for alerting me to this source.
Dr Hans Boening
A card in Olga’s papers identifies him, as of late 1944, as President Dr Boening, Reich Inspector of Labour Draft Plenipotentiaries (Reichsinspecteur des Generalvollmächtigen für den Arbeitseinsatz) with a Reichenburg address. A note on the back, dated 1 December 1944, reads ‘A request to Hr Dir. Wesseloky, AEG-Godenbach, to be willing to receive and advise Frau O. Danos’. After the war, Boening kept in contact with Olga—her papers contain a card from him with an Oldenburg address (Federal Republic of Germany) sent to her in New York in 1953.
Dresden Technical University
It is remarkable that Mischka’s studies at the TH were so comparatively normal, given that the university was only semi-functional, with some departments completely closed in connection with manpower call-ups. See Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942–1945, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. 355-6 (entry for 10 September 1944). Klemperer, a former professor of the Dresden TH, had been dismissed as a Jew.
Mauserl
The reference is to a German fairy story, ‘Hauserl und Mauserl’, that Olga must have read her children. It is set in Vienna.
Divorce
The visit to the lawyer is described in her diary for 2 May 1944. She does not return to the topic in later entries.
Letter from ‘Der Alte’
Thanks to Jan Danos for identifying the handwriting and the enclosed photograph as those of his father, and for deciphering and interpreting the text.
Chapter 6: The Bombing of Dresden
This chapter is based on the 1996 Musing ‘Dresden’ and Mischka’s diary entries for 12–22 April 1945, written two months after the bombing. The translation of the diary is a joint effort by me and a professional translator, Diana Weekes, for whose help I am very grateful.
On Nanni and the aftermath of the bombing, I draw on the musing ‘Shell Shock: Dresden, 1944, 1945’ and Mischka’s diary.
‘Christmas trees’
This is what Germans called the flairs dropped by bombing units to light up their targets.
Vonnegut
The reference is to the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose Slaughterhouse Five (1969) describes the bombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut himself, as an American POW, experienced. I never asked Misha what he thought of Vonnegut’s novel, but Matthew Lenoe, one of my Chicago students from the 1990s, did. He says Misha replied ‘that the reality was so surreal that he didn’t think you could top it with a surreal novel about the event’ (email to author, 22 October 2016).
Chapter 7: Displaced Persons in Flensburg
Principal sources are Mischka’s diary and letters to Olga; the musing ‘Occupation Forces in 1945’ (quotation on British arrogance); letters to Mischka from Nanni; interviews with Bičevskis and his ‘Bičevskis Family History’ email.
Pferdewasser school
In a pencilled latter to Olga dated 25 March 1945, Mischka referred to having ‘gone to Pferdewasser [in Flensburg, where the Timm K
roeger School was located], but it was overcrowded’, in a sentence wedged in between remarks about his suitcase and his hospital committal. But since he was taken semi-conscious from the station straight to the hospital, he couldn’t have done this, so it sounds like delirium. Probably the original plan was for Olga and Mischka to meet at the school.
Flensburg 1945
Information from Flensburg, 700 Jahre Stadt: Eine Festschrift (Flensburg: 1984) and Lange Schatten: Ende der NS-Diktatur and frühe Nachkriegsjahre (Flensburg: 2000). The latter includes concert programmes and excerpts from the Flensburger Stadt-Chronik/Flensburg News, from which I have quoted.
Eisenhower edict
General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later US president) was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.
DPs
In providing historical context on DPs, I have drawn to a large extent on my own scholarly research. The quotations on allied attitudes to DPs are from the UNRRA archives, New York, S-0425-0010-17 (‘Report on General Situation and Living Conditions of Displaced Persons and UNRRA, 1946’) and ibid., S-0402-0003-0001 (June 1945 report on ‘UNRRA and Displaced Persons’ by Harold Ingham). Good general works on the topic are Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (London: Vintage Books, 2011).
Mischka’s apologia
This is the undated (1946) ‘Rittergut’ statement [see Sources].
Reopening of German universities
Information from David Phillips, ‘The Re-opening of Universities in the British Zone: The Problem of Nationalism and Student Admissions’, in David Phillips (ed.), German Universities after the Surrender: British Occupation Policy and the Control of Higher Education (Oxford: University of Oxford Department of Educational Studies, 1983).