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Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York
In 1943, 22-year-old Latvian Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight - a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. A few months later, escaping conscription into the Waffen-SS in Riga, Mischka entered Hitler's Reich itself on a student exchange to Germany. There, as the war drew to an end, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. As he made his escape from Hitler's Reich he fell ill and was incarcerated in hospital before finally reuniting with his resourceful mother Olga, who had made her own way out of Riga, saving some Jews along the way. The diaries, correspondence and later recollections of mother and son provide a vivid recreation of life in occupied Germany, where anxiety, fear and loss were tempered by friendship, and where the ineptitude of international and occupation bureaucracies added its own touch of black humour. Sponsored as immigrants by one of the Jews Olga had saved, they eventually reached New York in the early 1950s. As refugee experiences go, they were among the lucky ones--but even luck leaves scars. The author, who met and married Mischka forty years after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling this remarkable story.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2017
6 people are currently reading
141 people want to read
About the author
Sheila Fitzpatrick
46 books161 followersSheila Fitzpatrick (born June 4, 1941, Melbourne) is an Australian-American historian. She teaches Soviet History at the University of Chicago.
Fitzpatrick's research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life. She is currently concentrating on the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s.
In her early work, Sheila Fitzpatrick focused on the theme of social mobility, suggesting that the opportunity for the working class to rise socially and as a new elite had been instrumental in legitimizing the regime during the Stalinist period. Despite its brutality, Stalinism as a political culture would have achieved the goals of the democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of the purges rather than its beneficiaries, noted the historian. Yet as a consequence of the "Great Purge", thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during the first five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government and the leadership of the Communist Party.
According to Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920 and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic and the industrial communities is explained in part by a "class struggle" against executives and intellectual "bourgeois". The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and the "Great Turn" found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit. In this vision, Stalinist policy based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.
Fitzpatrick was the leader of the second generation of "revisionist historians". She was the first to call the group of Sovietologists working on Stalinism in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist] historians".
Fitzpatrick called for a social history that did not address political issues, in other words that adhered strictly to a "from below" viewpoint. This was justified by the idea that the university had been strongly conditioned to see everything through the prism of the state: "the social processes unrelated to the intervention of the state is virtually absent from the literature." Fitzpatrick did not deny that the state's role in social change of the 1930s was huge. However, she defended the practice of social history "without politics". Most young "revisionists" did not want to separate the social history of the USSR from the evolution of the political system.
Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."
Fitzpatrick's research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life. She is currently concentrating on the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s.
In her early work, Sheila Fitzpatrick focused on the theme of social mobility, suggesting that the opportunity for the working class to rise socially and as a new elite had been instrumental in legitimizing the regime during the Stalinist period. Despite its brutality, Stalinism as a political culture would have achieved the goals of the democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of the purges rather than its beneficiaries, noted the historian. Yet as a consequence of the "Great Purge", thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during the first five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government and the leadership of the Communist Party.
According to Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920 and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic and the industrial communities is explained in part by a "class struggle" against executives and intellectual "bourgeois". The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and the "Great Turn" found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit. In this vision, Stalinist policy based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.
Fitzpatrick was the leader of the second generation of "revisionist historians". She was the first to call the group of Sovietologists working on Stalinism in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist] historians".
Fitzpatrick called for a social history that did not address political issues, in other words that adhered strictly to a "from below" viewpoint. This was justified by the idea that the university had been strongly conditioned to see everything through the prism of the state: "the social processes unrelated to the intervention of the state is virtually absent from the literature." Fitzpatrick did not deny that the state's role in social change of the 1930s was huge. However, she defended the practice of social history "without politics". Most young "revisionists" did not want to separate the social history of the USSR from the evolution of the political system.
Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 20, 2017
Written by a wife, whose background is that of being a Russian historian, about her husband , Mischka, a theoretical physicist, this was an interesting look into the life of a young man caught in war and his relationship with his mother, Olga.
Mischka, escaping from Latvia to avoid serving in the Russian army, goes to Nazi Germany. Being part Jewish this might have been a death sentence yet Mischka was able to lead a life there while trying to complete his education. He was also present at the devastating bombing of Dresden as he and another roamed the city while bombs fell around them thus giving him an eye witness account to the carnage. In his travels he also was witness to the bodies of Jewish people murdered by the Nazis and these events seemed to be ever present in his mind's eye.
In this biography is also the strong presence of Mischka's mother, Olga. She herself was a different woman, one of passion, mother to four sons, two of whom were eventually trapped behind the Iron Curtain never to be seen by her again. Her love for Mischka was strong and she always considered him her genius child. Their story is told mostly though their correspondence, diaries during the war torn years and Mischka's revelations to his wife about their relationship.
Mischka and his mother eventually emigrate to America but their relationship seems to drift apart as the years go by. It was a sad telling of two lives played out against the backdrop of war and the life that a displaced person led after the war ended.
For a look at what war looked like from a different point of view, not an American one, this biography told a story well. War is hell and its aftermath for those in its path is hell. However, the human spirit survives and goes on to lead a life that brings others and themselves some measure of happiness. It is evident that in this telling that Ms Fitzpatrick loved her husband and felt it so very important that his life story as well as Olga's be told.
Thanks you to NetGalley and I.B. Taurus & Company, LTD for providing an advanced copy of this novel for an unbiased review.
Mischka, escaping from Latvia to avoid serving in the Russian army, goes to Nazi Germany. Being part Jewish this might have been a death sentence yet Mischka was able to lead a life there while trying to complete his education. He was also present at the devastating bombing of Dresden as he and another roamed the city while bombs fell around them thus giving him an eye witness account to the carnage. In his travels he also was witness to the bodies of Jewish people murdered by the Nazis and these events seemed to be ever present in his mind's eye.
In this biography is also the strong presence of Mischka's mother, Olga. She herself was a different woman, one of passion, mother to four sons, two of whom were eventually trapped behind the Iron Curtain never to be seen by her again. Her love for Mischka was strong and she always considered him her genius child. Their story is told mostly though their correspondence, diaries during the war torn years and Mischka's revelations to his wife about their relationship.
Mischka and his mother eventually emigrate to America but their relationship seems to drift apart as the years go by. It was a sad telling of two lives played out against the backdrop of war and the life that a displaced person led after the war ended.
For a look at what war looked like from a different point of view, not an American one, this biography told a story well. War is hell and its aftermath for those in its path is hell. However, the human spirit survives and goes on to lead a life that brings others and themselves some measure of happiness. It is evident that in this telling that Ms Fitzpatrick loved her husband and felt it so very important that his life story as well as Olga's be told.
Thanks you to NetGalley and I.B. Taurus & Company, LTD for providing an advanced copy of this novel for an unbiased review.
July 3, 2017
In 1989, an Australian historian and a theoretical physicist originally from Latvia, fell into conversation on a plane and then fell in love. She became his third wife but they only had ten years together as he died in 1999.
She was Sheila Fitzpatrick, the renowned historian of modern Russia, whose books on the Russian revolution and Stalinism have become indispensable texts. In conversation with her husband she had pieced together many elements of his past but it was only after his death, aided by a box of documents which also included his mother’s papers, that this effort became systematic and finally issued in the current book: ‘Mischka’s War. A European Odyssey of the 1940s’.
It is a book which is partly an act of resurrection, making her husband breathe again, if only in print, and partly an act of demystification: an effort to understand that part of his life about which he’d been most reticent and which had been most difficult to comprehend.
In the 1990s Misha (the Russian diminutive that was Sheila’s name for Mischka) had himself sought to recover repressed memories of the 1940s, including his seeing the Jewish graves in the forest outside Riga, experiencing the bombing of Dresden and coming close to death from diptheria as a Displaced Person in Flensburg.
It is a remarkable story made all the more bizarre by the fact that Misha, who moved to Germany in 1944 to escape Soviet occupation, to advance his study of physics and to improve his chances of ultimately getting to the West, was actually half-Jewish: his father being an Hungarian Jew who, c.1900, had changed his name from Deutsch to Danos.
This book is engrossing not only because it deals with an intriguing individual but also because of the light which his experiences shed on some of the most important events and developments of the 1940s.
There are many other accounts of surviving the bombing of Dresden ranging from the Diaries of Viktor Klemperer to Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ but as Fitzpatrick points out, Misha’s account is “probably unique among eyewitness accounts” because whereas most survivors sheltered in one place, usually a cellar or basement, Misha was outside and saw what transpired in several parts of the city.
His experiences as a Displaced Person were more representative of the fate of the millions who experienced that condition at the end of World War Two and provides yet another reason why this book is to be commended: it reduces to individual dimensions phenomena which would otherwise strain, by virtue of their sheer immensity, our capacity for comprehension, let alone empathy.
She was Sheila Fitzpatrick, the renowned historian of modern Russia, whose books on the Russian revolution and Stalinism have become indispensable texts. In conversation with her husband she had pieced together many elements of his past but it was only after his death, aided by a box of documents which also included his mother’s papers, that this effort became systematic and finally issued in the current book: ‘Mischka’s War. A European Odyssey of the 1940s’.
It is a book which is partly an act of resurrection, making her husband breathe again, if only in print, and partly an act of demystification: an effort to understand that part of his life about which he’d been most reticent and which had been most difficult to comprehend.
In the 1990s Misha (the Russian diminutive that was Sheila’s name for Mischka) had himself sought to recover repressed memories of the 1940s, including his seeing the Jewish graves in the forest outside Riga, experiencing the bombing of Dresden and coming close to death from diptheria as a Displaced Person in Flensburg.
It is a remarkable story made all the more bizarre by the fact that Misha, who moved to Germany in 1944 to escape Soviet occupation, to advance his study of physics and to improve his chances of ultimately getting to the West, was actually half-Jewish: his father being an Hungarian Jew who, c.1900, had changed his name from Deutsch to Danos.
This book is engrossing not only because it deals with an intriguing individual but also because of the light which his experiences shed on some of the most important events and developments of the 1940s.
There are many other accounts of surviving the bombing of Dresden ranging from the Diaries of Viktor Klemperer to Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ but as Fitzpatrick points out, Misha’s account is “probably unique among eyewitness accounts” because whereas most survivors sheltered in one place, usually a cellar or basement, Misha was outside and saw what transpired in several parts of the city.
His experiences as a Displaced Person were more representative of the fate of the millions who experienced that condition at the end of World War Two and provides yet another reason why this book is to be commended: it reduces to individual dimensions phenomena which would otherwise strain, by virtue of their sheer immensity, our capacity for comprehension, let alone empathy.
June 5, 2025
‘This is a historian’s book, not a memoir, but it’s also a wife’s book about her husband.’
In 1989, Sheila Fitzpatrick, an Australian historian, met Mischka Danos, a theoretical physicist originally from Latvia, on a plane. They met by chance, fell into conversation, then into love and married. They had ten years together: Mischka died in 1999.
In this book, Ms Fitzpatrick pieces together Mischka’s life before she knew him, through diary entries, correspondence and recollections from others who knew him. It’s a way of remembering Mischka, of keeping him alive, of trying to understand his past. It also provides insights into the impact of World War II, on a family from the Baltic state of Latvia.
In 1943, while skiing through the Latvian woods, Mischka Danos came across a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the Germans. He was aged 22. Later, Mischka was to discover that he was part-Jewish. His father, Arpad, was a Hungarian Jew who had changed his name from Deutsch to Danos, around 1900. Did Mischka know this, I wondered, when he went on a student exchange to Germany to escape conscription into the Waffen-SS?
Mischka narrowly escaped death in the fire-bombing of Dresden, became a Displaced Person in occupied Germany before finally being reunited with his mother Olga. Mischka became a member of the Heidelberg school of physics and then both he and Olga were resettled in the USA at the beginning of the 1950s. Around the biographical facts, Ms Fitpatrick has provided the detail which brings both Mischka and Olga to life and provides the reader with the context for the choices made and the decisions taken.
Sheila Fitzpatrick is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the University of Chicago. She has written several books about Soviet history, as well as two memoirs: ‘My Father’s Daughter’ (2010) and ‘A Spy in the Archives’ (2013). I’ve added these memoirs to my reading list.
Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
In 1989, Sheila Fitzpatrick, an Australian historian, met Mischka Danos, a theoretical physicist originally from Latvia, on a plane. They met by chance, fell into conversation, then into love and married. They had ten years together: Mischka died in 1999.
In this book, Ms Fitzpatrick pieces together Mischka’s life before she knew him, through diary entries, correspondence and recollections from others who knew him. It’s a way of remembering Mischka, of keeping him alive, of trying to understand his past. It also provides insights into the impact of World War II, on a family from the Baltic state of Latvia.
In 1943, while skiing through the Latvian woods, Mischka Danos came across a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the Germans. He was aged 22. Later, Mischka was to discover that he was part-Jewish. His father, Arpad, was a Hungarian Jew who had changed his name from Deutsch to Danos, around 1900. Did Mischka know this, I wondered, when he went on a student exchange to Germany to escape conscription into the Waffen-SS?
Mischka narrowly escaped death in the fire-bombing of Dresden, became a Displaced Person in occupied Germany before finally being reunited with his mother Olga. Mischka became a member of the Heidelberg school of physics and then both he and Olga were resettled in the USA at the beginning of the 1950s. Around the biographical facts, Ms Fitpatrick has provided the detail which brings both Mischka and Olga to life and provides the reader with the context for the choices made and the decisions taken.
Sheila Fitzpatrick is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the University of Chicago. She has written several books about Soviet history, as well as two memoirs: ‘My Father’s Daughter’ (2010) and ‘A Spy in the Archives’ (2013). I’ve added these memoirs to my reading list.
Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
March 22, 2022
Fitzpatrick is one of my favorite authors! For me, in general, the idea of everyday historians to write history using letters, diaries, everyday objects, memories, etc is fascinating itself, as it is more convincing, more interesting to read and it throws the reader back to the actual historical time to re-live it! And Fitzpatrick is doing it remarkably amazingly (and it is a well know fact among modern-day academia). However, what is especially fascinating about this book is that now, when she is retired and has time to work on all kinds of projects, she chose to make an experiment and try to write objectively, as a historian, about the life of her late husband. And she did it! Hence, besides learning a lot about Latvian refugees, the history of the Baltic states, the processes of immigration during WWII, and many more, I also found it exciting to learn more about the process of writing this book. She explained it in detail at the end of the book! You can find there how did she conduct the interviews, how did she select the letters to analyze and many more. I really recommend going through it, you won't regret it! So much respect for this lady!!!! Thank you for your hard work!
July 27, 2017
History, memoir and biography all in one, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s exploration of the life of her Latvian husband Mischka Danos, who survived the ravages of WWII and managed to find refuge in the US, is a well-written and engaging account, a balanced mix of the personal and the historical. Based on diaries, correspondence and personal recollections, the story is an absorbing and moving one, and a gripping description of life in war-torn Europe.
May 11, 2020
In the Winter of 1943, Mischka Danos made a gruesome discovery outside Riga - a pit filled with
the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. In order to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS - the authors of such atrocities - Mischka volunteered to go on a student exchange to Germany. Whilst in Germany, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Surviving Hitler's Reich, he became a DP in occupied Germany, where in 1951 he earned a PhD at the exceptional Heidelberg Physics Institute. In the 1950s Mischka was sponsored as an immigrant to the US by a Jewish survivor whom his mother, Olga, had saved during Riga's worst period of Jewish arrests. As refugee experiences go his was moderate. The author Sheila Fitzpatrick, whom he met and married Mischka forty years after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey and survival.
The book is an inside view of this period from a different perspective and is well worth the read. Not literary or historical but a tender hybrid.
the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. In order to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS - the authors of such atrocities - Mischka volunteered to go on a student exchange to Germany. Whilst in Germany, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Surviving Hitler's Reich, he became a DP in occupied Germany, where in 1951 he earned a PhD at the exceptional Heidelberg Physics Institute. In the 1950s Mischka was sponsored as an immigrant to the US by a Jewish survivor whom his mother, Olga, had saved during Riga's worst period of Jewish arrests. As refugee experiences go his was moderate. The author Sheila Fitzpatrick, whom he met and married Mischka forty years after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey and survival.
The book is an inside view of this period from a different perspective and is well worth the read. Not literary or historical but a tender hybrid.
March 11, 2019
An extraordinarily brilliant book written by an (Australian) historian of Russia and Communism, as a memoir/history of her husband, Mischka, a Latvian (German, American eventually) physicist. This book is in part so fascinating as he was allowed (and chose) to go to German to study physics in early 1940's - when most smart people were avoiding Germany. And in the midst of the War he was able o study physics. There is a lot to learn in this book - about his experiences growing up in Latvia, his relationship with his family, his lack of awareness that his father was half-Jewish - which he seems genuinely not to have known. What an interesting well written book!
June 21, 2017
Mischka's War
A European Odyssey of the 1940s
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Melbourne University Publishing
Melbourne University Press
Biographies & Memoirs , History
Pub Date 03 Jul 2017
I am reviewing a copy of Mischka's War through Melbourne University Press and Netgalley:
Misha was born in Riga, Latvia in 1922. In 1940 Mischka had just finished school and started his first job at Riga's State Electrotechnical Factory.
Olga and Arpad Danos were married around 1920. Arpad sound success with a singing career until he lost his voice, then he lost both his singing career and his wealth. But in 1926 the family still had their wealth and was able for the family to spend a year in Italy.
On June.22.1941 Operation Barbosa was launched against the Soviet's.
Mary and Olga were pure ethnic Latvians, but they did not agree with the Nazi's persecution and acted accordingly. Mary hid Jews in her apartment and was arrested on March.18.1943.
All three of the Danos brothers were of call up age but none of them wanted to serve in the German army. Jan was the first one to get into real trouble he was called up in January 1943 and went into hiding for six months but was caught and imprisoned for six months. In February of 1944 he was released from prison and taken to the hospital where he was treated for Pleurisy.
Misha came before the mobilization commission on December.09.1943 he was temporararily excused At the end of April 1944 Misha set off to study in Germany.
Mischka married Helga in 1949.
I give Mischka's War five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!
January 28, 2018
Sheila Fitzpatrick is an excellent historian, and she does bring her analytical skills to bear on a history of her beloved husband, a Latvian-German physicist who she met on a plane and then became his third wife. The story is a fascinating one, placing some of Europe's most traumatic events into the context of her husband's personal journey, and reminding us that people did continue with their everyday lives even in the midst of tremendous chaos and tragedy. She kept some admirable historical distance from the subject when recounting Mischka's involvement in historic events; his first-hand account of the fire-bombing of Dresden at the end of the war is harrowing and worth reading the book. The problem I had was that Mischka did not have the most attractive personality, and Fitzpatrick's details about his personal life were at times tedious to read and verged on apologetic. She can be praised for avoiding outright hagiography, but her personal involvement caused her to lean a little too heavily on making excuses for his egocentric behavior. The portrayal of his energetic and talented mother Olga was much more compelling. I think the book would have been stronger if she had ended the narrative earlier than she did; she would then have avoided some of the more uninteresting aspects of personal memoir.
December 13, 2019
From the book cover: Sheila Fitzpatrick pieces together her late husband's story through diaries, correspondence and recollections: 'This is a historian's book but it's also a wife's book about her husband ... an offering of love that is also a search for knowledge.'
But, as Sheila Fitzpatrick confesses, it is as much the story of Olga, Mischka's courageous and unconventional mother.
Such stories remind us how much we take for granted, and how carelessly we often treat the freedoms that we enjoy.
This memoir is satisfying on several levels. Thank you Sheila Fitzpatrick for sharing it.
But, as Sheila Fitzpatrick confesses, it is as much the story of Olga, Mischka's courageous and unconventional mother.
Such stories remind us how much we take for granted, and how carelessly we often treat the freedoms that we enjoy.
This memoir is satisfying on several levels. Thank you Sheila Fitzpatrick for sharing it.
December 20, 2020
Really interesting book , both a testament to a loving family and painting a vivid picture of the confusion and trauma in ww2 europe . It was also illuminating to read about the displaced people of europe and a timeline of events surrounding their status. I personally enjoyed reading more about Latvian history too both in Riga and the wider country. The writers love for her husband is all over the pages .
September 29, 2017
Covers the experience of one family as they became, or tried to become, displaced persons in WWII.
Mischka and his mother left Latvia and entered Germany, eventually ending up in the USA. Based on the letters and diaries associated with both, written by Mischka's last wife and historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. Other family members stayed to endure the Soviet occupation, eventually reconnecting after the dissolution of the USSR.
Mischka and his mother left Latvia and entered Germany, eventually ending up in the USA. Based on the letters and diaries associated with both, written by Mischka's last wife and historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. Other family members stayed to endure the Soviet occupation, eventually reconnecting after the dissolution of the USSR.
September 17, 2022
I didn’t like the characters at all. An excessive and obsessive Olga, an arrogant and self opinionated Mischka. Incredible research but this didn’t make for an engaging and cohesive read.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews