Mischka's War: A True Story of Survival in Nazi Dresden

‘This is a historian’s book, not a memoir, but it’s also a wife’s book about her husband.’ 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

One of the most acclaimed historians of twentieth-century Russia, she is the author of several books, including The Russian Revolution; Stalin’s Peasants, Everyday Stalinism, Tear off the Masks! and A Spy in the Archive: A Memoir of Cold War Russia (I.B.Tauris, 2013). Sheila Fitzpatrick is Emerita Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Hon

'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. The result is an absorbing, unsettling, rare and memorable book.' - Don Watson, author of The Bush . 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 fur Physik), his love of sport and music, and his multiple liaisons. Drawing on diaries and letters, she retraces Mischa'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 'si

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. Sponsored as immigrants by one of the Jews Olga had saved, they eventually reached New York in the early 1950s. 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. 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. As refugee experiences go, they were among the lucky ones—but even luck leaves scars. There, as the war drew to an end, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied f