Mischka's War
A European Odyssey of the 1940s
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
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Pub Date Jul 03 2017 | Archive Date Jul 17 2017
Melbourne University Publishing | Melbourne University Press
Description
On a winter's day in 1943, 22-year-old Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight as he skied through Latvian woods—a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. The world was full of such atrocities, which makes Mischka’s decision to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS by going on a student exchange to Germany all the more remarkable. Even more so when Mischka later discovered he was part-Jewish.
But his was no ordinary life. He narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire bombing of Dresden. He then lived the precarious life of a Displaced Person in occupied Germany before heading north with the hope of crossing the border into Denmark, where he finally reunited with his mother Olga. He went on to become a member of the exceptional Heidelberg school of physics. They were both resettled in the US at the beginning of the 1950s, which is where, much later, he met, fell in love with and married Sheila Fitzpatrick.
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.'
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Sheila Fitzpatrick is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the University of Chicago. Mischka's War is the third in her series of memoirs, including My Father's Daughter (2010) and A Spy in the Archives (2013). She has written many books on Soviet history, including On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, which was joint winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780522867855 |
| PRICE | A$34.99 (AUD) |
Featured Reviews
John P, Media/Journalist
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.
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