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.

‘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

I had a hard time getting into this book. Since I did not finish it, I do not intend to publish a review.

This is a really well researched fascinating read. Sheila Fitzpatrick was the third wife of Mischka. She has done a lot of research into his life and the period of history that he lived through. He lived through a lot and packed a lot into his life.

Mischka's War is not just a story about a survivor of the atrocities in Europe during WWII. It is the story of a man with difficult choices facing him, discoveries all through the book about who he is and how strong a person can be when they need to be. This book is a tribute to a man whose choices were made for survival and showed great character. I do hope this 5 star tale makes it into the hands of every student studying this time period, to any one who has ever had an interest in WWII history and also to anyone who has ever tried to lump a group of people into one category because of what 1 group of evil, soul-less people perpetrated. It was inspiring and life changing.

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!

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.

Fitzpatrick, a historian of Soviet Russia, met and married physicist Michael Danos in the 1990s, but only after his death pieced together the family records of his extraordinary experiences in WWII. Assimilated Hungarian Jews in Latvia, his family faced threats from both the Russian and German occupations of the Baltic (two of his sisters were taken off to gulags), and through luck and planning, he avoided conscription by the Latvian, Russian and German armies by volunteering for academic study in Germany, narrowly avoided being in the fire-bombing of Dresden, then survived displaced persons camps after the war.

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.