Mischka's War Read online

  SHEILA FITZPATRICK is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the University of Chicago. One of the most acclaimed historians of twentieth-century Russia, she is the author of many books, including The Russian Revolution, Stalin’s Peasants, Everyday Stalinism, Tear off the Masks!, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics and A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia (I.B.Tauris, 2013).

  ‘In her latest book, renowned historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recounts the remarkable wartime odyssey of Michael Danos (1922-1999), known also at various times as Mikelis/Mischa/Mischka, the theoretical physicist to whom she was married until his death. Drawing on diaries and letters, she retraces Mischka’s journey from occupied Riga via a displaced persons camp to Heidelberg, where his career began to take off. Fitzpatrick does not claim that Mischka’s story was representative, indeed she thinks of it as “singular”. It’s an honest and sometimes unflinching account: we learn of his devotion to his mother, his fledgling scientific career (he regularly carried in his suitcase twenty volumes of the Zeitschrift für Physik), his love of sport and music, and his multiple liaisons. When he and his first wife reached the USA in 1951, he proclaimed “We made it”. In this labour of love, Fitzpatrick shows how they did, and why it matters.’

  Peter Gatrell, Professor of Economic History, Manchester University and author of The Making of the Modern Refugee

  ‘At once tender and forensic: a beguiling combination of scholarship and love.’

  Anna Goldsworthy, author of Piano Lessons

  ‘Two dramas are played out in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Mischka’s War: that of Misha, navigating the European catastrophe with an equanimity that often threatens to confound our understanding of it; and the author’s own drama, as she tries to preserve the historian’s objectivity and “distance” from even the most terrible events, while uncovering the story of one man among the millions caught up in them—the man she met and fell in love with long after the war was over. The result is an absorbing, unsettling, rare and memorable book.’

  Don Watson, author of The Bush

  Published in 2017 by

  I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

  London • New York

  www.ibtauris.com

  Copyright © 2017 Sheila Fitzpatrick

  The right of Sheila Fitzpatrick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

  References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

  ISBN: 978 1 78831 022 2

  elSBN: 978 1 78672 254 6

  ePDF: 978 1 78673 254 5

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

  Contents

  Introduction

  Mischka and Olga

  1 Family

  2 Childhood

  3 Riga under the Soviets

  4 Riga under the Germans

  5 Wartime Germany

  6 The Bombing of Dresden

  7 Displaced Persons in Flensburg

  8 Olga, from Flensburg to Fulda

  9 Student in Hanover

  10 Physics and Marriage in Heidelberg

  11 Olga’s Departure

  12 Mischka’s Departure

  Afterword

  Notes

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Misha in Paris cafe, 1990.

  EVERYBODY always asks me about my accent, and Misha was no exception; he thought I was Danish. It was unlike him to behave like anybody else, as I soon found out, but there are only so many pick-up lines to use on strange women on planes. At least it was better than his gently melancholy remark the next day, ‘I must be twice your age,’ to which I was able to give the once-in-a-lifetime riposte: ‘You’re 96, then?’ In any case, I didn’t waste time on the boring answer that I was an Australian with an unplaceable hybrid accent, and batted the Danish question back—where was he from? I thought I already knew the answer, having observed that he was writing a letter to Chère Agnès and decided he was French. ‘The Baltics’, was the reply.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked, slightly irritated.

  ‘The middle one.’

  That was vintage Misha, always avoiding a direct answer, and not just because he liked to tease; he liked not releasing information, too. In a schoolmarmish tone, I informed him that, as a Soviet historian by trade, I knew which of the Baltics was which. ‘So you speak Russian?’ That was great good luck, because Russian had escaped the deep freeze into which depression had put my English, though (pace Misha) English was my native language. The conversation took off at a Russian gallop before slowing abruptly as Misha switched back into English. Later he explained that he had run headlong into the second-person pronoun, which in Russian comes in either a familiar or an impersonal form: as a European born in 1922, he could not use the intimate Russian form with a woman he had just met, but as a romantic he couldn’t not use it, because he was falling in love. That was vintage Misha, too, both the belief in instant intuitive knowledge and the willingness to act on it. I was temperamentally more cautious, but in this case, unlike him, I had nothing to lose. The year was 1989, annus mirabilis in the Eastern bloc.

  We married and lived happily ever after, which turned out to be ten years—by coincidence or not, the number I had bargained with God about at the beginning, for the first and only time in my life (‘Five years if you must, but please, if you possibly can, ten years, and I’ll pay you back with ten years of mine’). I should have asked for more, of course. Misha had his first stroke on 23 September 1999 and his second, the one that destroyed his brain, on the 24th. As the incumbent wife, I summoned his three children and his second wife, Vicky (who lived nearby), to the deathbed. Helga, his first wife, was in town too, looking after the grandchildren, but I didn’t invite her to the hospital because she and Misha were not on good terms. None of us had dealt with a death in the family before, and Misha, a resolute denier of death in the spirit of Kingsley Amis’s anti-death league, had left no instructions. We held a wake in our little cottage in Washington, DC, not far from the Potomac River and the C&O Canal that runs beside it; the guests were mainly work colleagues, physicists, like Misha. ‘Which is the wife?’ I heard someone ask. In fact, all three were present.

  After the wake, we had a family meeting to discuss what to do with his ashes. We thought of scattering them in the Potomac, but decided against it because of legal doubts (did one need a permit?) and some unwillingness on my part to acknowledge an American claim on him. Riga seemed the obvious alternative, consoling for his surviving brothers who still lived there, though a bit out of sync with his conspicuous lack of desire to embrace Latvia as his lost homeland. Finally, Vicky, Misha’s second wife, came up with the solution: take his ashes to Riga and scatter them in the Baltic, thus giving him access to all the oceans of the world, as befitted a world citizen. That’s what we did.

  After Misha’s death, I got in the habit of going to his eldest child Johanna’s house each year for the anniversary. Johanna had the box that Misha had told me contained his mother’s papers, and
on the sixth year we decided to open it and look for photographs. It turned out that the papers there were not just his mother’s but also Misha’s, dating from the late 1930s, when Misha was an adolescent in Riga, through the 1940s and early ‘50s, when he and his mother were both ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) in Germany before resettling in the United States. Misha’s diaries were there, along with his mother Olga’s diaries; correspondence between the two of them about all manner of things (news, business, music and, on Misha’s part, physics, philosophy and sport); letters from Misha’s brothers and old friends; official documents relating to their DP status; Misha’s notebooks with physics jottings; address books; letters between Misha and Helga Heimers, the young German woman he met at the sports club in Hanover and married in 1949; as well as lots of photographs, including a whole bunch of Misha flying through the air as a pole vaulter.

  Does the opening of the box explain why I am writing this book? In a way it does, as it is a historian’s natural instinct on finding a collection of previously undiscovered papers to use them for something. For a few years this was the justification I gave for doing what I was doing, namely cataloguing the papers, translating them (they are mainly in German, with excursions into Latvian and Russian, odd sentences in English and, in Olga’s case, even some diary entries in Italian) and seeking out family and friends who knew him in the 1940s to interview.

  But of course that explanation isn’t good enough. You don’t write a book about a time in your husband’s life when you didn’t even know him, when he wasn’t your husband but someone else’s, just because you discover a nice set of documents. So I must have had other reasons, and I recognised one of them when, around the same time, I started writing a memoir of my own Australian childhood and discovered at first hand the power to bring the dead back to life by writing about them. If I could do this for my parents and great-aunt in the Australian memoir, why not for Misha, the person I most wanted back from the dead?

  That still left the question of why I should choose to write about Misha not in the time I knew him but half a century before I met him. It took me a while to work this one out, but finally I got there. It was because this was the part of his life I didn’t understand, the part that had worried me a little from the beginning. I remember our first conversation about the war, when he said he had gone to Germany in the spring of 1944. In 1944? With the war still on and the Nazis in power? I was shocked, even frightened. Why would one do such a thing? Misha explained that in his family’s judgement, the Germans were going to lose the war, and then the Soviets would come back into Latvia, which in everyday-life terms was worse than the Nazis, unless one happened to be a Jew, which he was not. He wanted to get out so as to study physics in Germany (before the war, the best place in the world for it, or so he thought), escape the coming second Soviet occupation of the Baltics and have a chance of getting to the West when the war was over. That was a shock too; up to then, without really thinking about it, I had assumed that living under the Nazis was worse than under the Soviets because they had the nastier ideology. But when I thought about it, I saw that it made sense. Misha told me all this in a matter-of-fact way, without embarrassment, but I remember wondering (though silently) if it had caused any problems for him when he was a DP in Europe applying for a US visa.

  That was how things stood until a few years after Misha died, when his daughter Johanna visited the Danos family in Riga and came back with the news that Misha’s Hungarian father was Jewish. This was even more of a shock, both because of the danger Misha had put himself in by going to Nazi Germany and because, in this important early conversation with me, he had so clearly indicated that he was not Jewish. How could he, the son of a Jew, even if passing as Aryan, have taken the incredible risk of going willingly to Germany in the spring of 1944? Was it possible that he didn’t know about the Jewish forebears in Hungary? And a more visceral reaction: how could he have misled me?

  Whether he knew or didn’t know is a complicated story. Helga and her two daughters didn’t know anything about any Jewish connections of the Danos family. Misha’s brother Jan said he (Jan) had found out only in the 1980s, from the last surviving Hungarian relative, that the family was at least half Jewish and had changed their name from Deutsch to Danos around 1900, and that he had passed the news on to Misha. Vicky, Misha’s wife at that time, confirms this; she remembers Misha reporting it humorously as a rather pleasing discovery—‘Now I can say I am [Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Martin] Deutsch’s cousin.’ But he had evidently forgotten again by the time I asked him or, to put it another way, did not consider it a significant datum: the point he was making to me was that persons identified/identifying as Jews were at risk in Nazi Germany, but he was not such a person. No doubt if I had said to him, ‘But wasn’t your father half-Jewish?’ he would have said yes, but so what?—the father was secular, Catholic by official religion, an atheist by conviction, not known as a Jew in Riga and not interested in the whole question, and neither were we. But I didn’t know to ask that question.

  So there are some mysteries and hidden things in Misha’s 1940s story. That raises the question about whether, in that case, I should write about it. Misha was honest but secretive by temperament, or at least not a gratuitous discloser; he would tell you what he saw as the deep truth and ignore what he considered to be trivial aspects. Thus, in our second conversation, he told me with considerable emotion that he had been found to have a kidney problem that was likely to be fatal within a short time. I remember the awful sinking feeling with which I heard it—finally I meet the right man and it turns out he’s dying!—and the jarring though happy reversal when it turned out, in response to my cross-examination, that the kidney crisis had occurred twenty years ago, at the end of his first marriage, and that he had been functioning perfectly well on whatever proportion was left to him ever since.

  Is it a betrayal, then, to try to find out and understand more about Misha in the 1940s?

  Misha had a natural sense of loyalty to those he loved, which to some extent inhibited his critical judgement of them: this was so when he spoke of his mother or his elder brother Arpad, for example, and it was evident in his unquestioningly high evaluation of me as a historian and of Vicky as an artist (not that I’m saying he was wrong, but the judgement was axiomatic rather than derived from observation). Whenever I told him about a disagreement I had had with a colleague, he was always unreservedly on my side. It was how his own mother had been with him, and the opposite of how my mother had been with me, and I found it extraordinarily lovable.

  But I could never be like that. I am a committed ferreter out of detail, personally as well as professionally; no matter how much I love someone, I have never been able to take their self-evaluation on trust, as Misha could sometimes do, but always wanted to find out all about them, including things they might not have intended to tell me. Having fallen in love, Misha was eager in principle to tell me everything about himself, as well as to learn everything about me; that’s how we come to have the occasional reflections on his life and thoughts, which he called ‘musings’, on which I draw in this book. (For more on the musings, mainly originating as emails to me in the 1990s, see the Sources section.) It has even occurred to me that in writing the musings, he might in a way have anticipated a book like this one, although at that stage of my life I had never written anything like it. I am a historian, after all, and the source base he left me was at least partly consciously created. A close reading of his diaries suggests that even earlier in his life, when he wrote things down, it was not just to record but also to communicate.

  As is evident from the Jewish story, however, not everything struck Misha as ‘non-trivial’ enough (a favourite word) to pass on. He would answer questions, but there were times when the impossibility of communicating a deep truth frustrated him to the point of anger (he had the same problem as a physicist talking to other physicists), and other times when he would resent an attempt to put him in a category (
for example, as a Latvian; as a native speaker of German; or in more or less any way other than as a theoretical physicist) and burst out that it was irrelevant, he was not one of those people in normal categories, he was himself, uncategorisable.

  When, in our first year together, Misha conducted what was in effect an informal psychoanalysis of me, he was puzzled by the way in which I recounted my life, as if it were something from which I was detached. Initially he thought of this as neurotic, but after a while he changed his mind and redefined this detachment of mine as a virtue, even an object of his admiration. He didn’t do detachment: as he explained, he had had to give up experimental physics because his intense engagement influenced outcomes, whereas my extreme form of it was, he concluded, the secret of my success as an ‘experimentalist’ (this was his term, borrowed from the natural sciences, for all empirical historians not driven by Grand Theory, which in history—though not in physics—he despised).

  This is a historian’s book, not a memoir, but it’s also a wife’s book about her husband. There are tensions between those two purposes, sometimes commented on. I hope they turn out to be the kind of tensions that make things more interesting rather than the spoiling kind. Appropriately for a wife’s book, I draw on my own memories, along with things Misha told me about his life, but I behave like a historian in dealing with documents and the memories of those who knew him in the 1940s. (Sometimes I even quietly throw in a few archival nuggets, by-products of my current academic work on DPs, which in turn owes its origin indirectly to Misha.)

  In describing the German years, I’m not going to call him Misha, the Russian diminutive that was my name for him, and also his family’s back in Riga. Instead, I will use the name by which he was known in Germany in the 1940s, and throughout his life to Helga and his children: Mischka. For his early years, and throughout the text when I interpolate something based on my own direct knowledge from the 1990s, I’ll call him Misha. Misha/Mischka would answer to both names, as well as to Michael, Mikhail, Michel, Mikelis, Michika and Mike, but he would never say which of the formal versions was his ‘real’ name (his documents give both Michael and the Latvian Mikelis) or admit that any of the three languages he spoke in childhood (German, Latvian and Russian) was his native language. When his daughter Johanna and I talk about him, she calls him Mischka and I call him Misha, not in a spirit of disagreement but rather of recognition of separate claims. My use of Mischka in the book is perhaps the same kind of recognition. It’s a reminder to myself and the reader that the man I am writing about is, and is not, my husband.