Mischka's War

by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)

  As I’ve said before, Misha was a man whose loyalty to those he loved was absolute. Thus, when my old Sovietological battles about totalitarianism briefly flared up again with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he was outraged on my behalf, much more than I was, writing a private musing in 1993 calling my most prominent critics ‘assassinators’ moved by prejudice, hatred, self-hatred and self-interest. I didn’t see it in such stark black-and-white terms, and indeed would have been highly embarrassed had he ever met the ‘assassinators’ face to face and denounced them on my behalf, as he would very likely have done. But who wouldn’t have such a loyal knight, ready to fight their battles, at their side? I marvelled at my good fortune. It was fortunate, too, that Misha happened never to have read any of the assassinators’ books before he met me. He would almost certainly have liked them.

  4

  Riga under the Germans

  Misha the pole vaulter.

  OPERATION Barbarossa, launched against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, was a spectacular success. It took the German forces less than two weeks to advance into the Baltics and occupy Riga. Misha’s VEF, being classified as of national (Soviet) significance, had to be evacuated to the east, in circumstances of high alarm and danger for all concerned as the Germans advanced; very likely some of the more valuable personnel were evacuated east as well. Misha was assigned to help with the loading of machinery and materials, but by good luck—everyone who survived the war living in war zones had to have had luck at many points, and Misha was no exception—he was temporarily absent from the scene at the crucial moment:

  In this loading [of machinery and materials for evacuation] I sustained an injury (by playing around), which I got taken care of in the medical office; since I could not continue with the loading operation I was given an official paper sending me home. As I found out much later, I was the last person to leave the compound: a troup of Russian soldiers arrived to oversee the operation, and they immediately sealed all exits. At some point a number of the employees were already lined up against a wall to be shot; that was prevented by a Russian officer who came upon the scene. I know of no details about this event. I was not too unhappy for not having been present.

  Artillery shells fell on Riga as the Germans advanced, ‘and then the war was over, for the time being: suddenly it was totally quiet’:

  I ventured out, and on the square by the station I saw the first dead soldier: a young, perhaps 18-year-old Russian, sitting in a normal position at the wheel of a truck, seemingly alive, but actually dead. Lying around were rifles, other war materiel, abandoned vehicles. The population was in a jubilant mood, showing it; I had never thought that the Latvians, usually restrained, were capable of that. There already stood young men, 20-30, in columns of twos, 10 deep, with rifles picked up from the ground, ready to join in the fight against the Russians. They were disbanded: ‘Thank you. We do not need your help.’ (I saw the older brother, standing in one of these columns.)

  This is a typically laconic account, especially of the unwelcome sight of his brother Arpad. Misha thought that the Latvian nationalist would-be collaborators were naive fools, as he told me in an only slightly elaborated verbal account of this sighting, but he was always unwilling to criticise Arpad, whom he once described to me as ‘a kind of Solzhenitsyn’, meaning by that a man of rare moral conscience, but unworldly. (In my observation, Arpad was indeed unworldly and almost pathologically ethical in his approach to life, but gentle and humanly disengaged as well, quite unlike the provocative and belligerent Solzhenitsyn; Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin might have been a better analogy.)

  As with the Soviet occupiers, Misha’s first experience of the German occupiers was in his capacity as an employee of VEF. How much the Soviets succeeded in evacuating before they themselves were driven out is unclear, but in any case the factory kept going under the Germans:

  At the time the news of the German invasion arrived I was in the assembly line shop; as the news was announced over the factory speaker system, activities in the shop stopped; one of the soldering girls jumped up and flung herself onto the lap of the boss: now life will end, one way or another, so, until then, over the remaining days: sex. I saw that, with a mixture of feeling bad, compassion for the girl, surprise about that unexpected reaction of hers, and a vague, unspecified foreboding.

  When, after a month or so, Misha recovered from his injury and went back to work at VEF, he found that

  things had changed, not too much in form, but the emphasis of the production was changing by responding to the needs and demands of the German war machine. Most obvious, and also unexpected, was the loosening of the discipline, associated with the disappearance of the fear factor. Under the Russians, the work was scheduled to begin at 7.30 in the morning, and one was to remain on the premises until, if I remember correctly, 17.30. Everybody was there at 7.30. No question. Tardiness was punishable by almost death, so it seemed. Upon the arrival of the Germans, that threat—and, in the beginning, any other threat—was gone. We began arriving later and later, and leaving for lunch outside of the factory, going earlier and earlier; nothing happened.

  With the factory back to normal, more or less, Misha resumed his prowlings around the shops, observing different aspects of production. Since he knew German, he was given the task of translating the operating manuals from Russian into German, which he did at his own pace, using the opportunity to teach himself to touch-type—something that, as was his wont, he invented from scratch with a fine imperviousness to any possible precedents (‘I devised the optimal system of how to type with minimal hand motions, which then would allow typing without looking’).

  A couple of months later, in the autumn of 1941, Misha managed to enrol at the university as an electrical engineering student, so he went to the VEF bosses and told them he was quitting. They accepted his decision, though unwillingly. He was lucky again in his timing—or perhaps his practical mother was keeping an eye on things—as shortly afterwards work at VEF was declared essential for the German war effort, and quitting became impossible. But Misha got in under the wire.

  At university, Misha ‘wouldn’t play the game’, according to Andrejs Bičevskis, meaning he often failed to attend lectures, preferred to offer his own proofs in assignments rather than those taught in class and refused to memorise his notes for exams. As a result, his grades were not as good as they should have been, although, Bičevskis noted, there were some professors who thought he was exceptional. Misha himself always recognised that, not boastfully but as a given, and so had his early teachers at the gymnasium and—as a strongly supportive constant in his life—his mother. He tended to assume that teachers and colleagues who failed to do so were dullards, best avoided.

  The University of Riga—founded in 1919 on the basis of the Riga Polytechnic—was probably quite strong in engineering, but it was not the top higher educational institution in the Baltics: that title was held by the University of Tartu (formerly Dorpat University) in Estonia. Misha told me little about his university experience in Riga, and his only musing on the subject is about the lack of German impact on university affairs: the old professors (‘of course minus the ones exterminated during the Soviet occupation’) stayed on, working as they had always done. My impression was that he didn’t think he was learning anything new, had no particular respect for his professors and generally wasn’t interested. Sports gained more of his attention. He joined the university sports club, Universitates Sports, after the closing of the German one, and ran the 800 metres, in which he was, according to Bičevskis, good but not at the very top of Riga’s sportsmen. He then switched to pole vaulting, where he showed typical fearlessness (it was dangerous in those days, with bamboo poles and nothing much to fall on) and went right to the top in the local scene. He played ice hockey too, playing goalie first in the German Union team and then in the university’s second team, generally distinguishing himself sufficiently to be included in a history of Latvian sport in this capacity. He was even
elected to the board of directors of the university club, being, as he related with some pride, the youngest member.

  When Misha later remembered the German occupation, implicitly comparing it with the Russian, it was its comparatively normal, laissez-faire quality that struck him. The Germans, in his account, just brought in the top people in every sector (civil service, university, police) and left the Latvians to run things the same way they had run them before the Russians came. He didn’t notice any overt Germanising or de-Latvianising activities and observed that, in contrast to the Soviets, they didn’t change the street names or even write them in German. It was, in fact, a decision made by Hitler that the Baltics were not to be put under military rule but allowed a certain amount of autonomy.

  Apart from Arpad Jr, the Danos family does not seem to have welcomed the German invaders, even as a counterforce to the Soviets, but they didn’t oppose them either; rather, the attitude seems to have been one of wary observation: what now? In later life, Misha thought it self-evident that the Soviets were more dangerous as occupiers than the Germans because of their propensity to casual violence, their lack of respect for law and property, and the randomness of their targets. That came as a shock to me at first: born into a left-wing family in Australia during the war, when the Soviet Union was our ally and Nazi Germany the enemy, I had grown up assuming the opposite, namely that however bad the Soviets may have been, the Nazis were worse. As an adult, I had, of course, heard versions of Misha’s judgement before, since it is shared by virtually all who experienced both occupations in the Baltics, except Jews, but I had put it down to anti-Communist prejudice. I couldn’t dismiss Misha’s judgement like that. Perhaps, I decided, he was right. The Germans seem in fact to have killed more people (most of them Jews), but they also had a longer period of occupation to do it in. And there was no nightmarish equivalent of the sudden large-scale Soviet deportations of June 1941 to shock the population.

  Not that Misha had a good opinion of the German occupiers. From 1941, there are no more diary reflections on his kinship with Germans or German culture. The Germans’ racial theories repelled him:

  Concerning the long range plans, I heard that at a party where the Latvian top officials, of course subordinates to the Germans, were present, and who heard that the plan as far as the members of the German Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Region was concerned, the Jews of course will have been exterminated; the Poles were to be the unskilled workers, while the Baltics were higher race and were going to be foremen. This the Germans talked about without bothering to notice the presence of the Latvians.

  This has the characteristic ring of Misha’s automatic hostility to anyone’s categorical claims to superiority, whether it be on grounds of race, status, descent or anything else. In addition, it sounds as if he was now identifying at least partially as a Latvian, a definite shift from his position a couple of years earlier. A sporting contemporary remembers a similar comment from him on the occasion of a competition with a German team, which, it appears, the Latvians won—‘and they consider us a lesser race!’

  The great exception to the Germans’ relative tolerance was their response to Jews. Among their first order of business was to round up Jews—that is, those so identified in Riga’s highly compartmentalised society—and put them in a ghetto. After a few months, they started shooting the Latvian Jews in the ghetto: about twenty-five thousand Jews from the Riga ghetto are estimated to have been shot in November-December 1941, partly to make room for the trainloads of Jews from Central Europe who were being brought in at the same time, many of them to be killed in their turn. Misha doesn’t seem to have personally known anybody who suffered this fate; Olga, as we shall see, did. He knew about the ghetto, however, and he also knew that the Germans were bringing in Jews from Germany and Austria to the Riga ghetto, ‘where after a while most of them were shot’.

  Nobody in the Danos family ever mentioned any anxiety on their own part during the German occupation about the possibility of being taken for, and punished as, Jews. The sons may not have known of the Jewish Hungarian ancestry, but their father obviously did, and surely their mother also. When, in the 2000s, I quizzed two of Misha’s Latvian friends from the 1940s about whether they had thought his father might be Jewish, they conceded after some prevarication that yes, the thought had fleetingly crossed their minds, not that they cared either way. If the thought might have crossed their minds, it might also have crossed those of malicious neighbours and business and professional rivals, but actually Arpad Sr was lucky: he never was denounced as a Jew, as far as we know, and lived through both occupations without any particular problems. Olga’s sister Mary Sakss was not so fortunate.

  Mary and Olga were pure ethnic Latvians without a stain on their racial character. But they didn’t like the Nazi persecution of Jews, and acted accordingly. Mary hid Jews in her apartment to save them from the Gestapo and was denounced for it by a neighbour. The Germans promptly arrested her on 18 March 1943 and sent her first to Salaspils concentration camp outside Riga and then to Ravensbrück, north of Berlin. This was the second disaster to have struck her family, the first being the Soviet authorities’ arrest and deportation eastward of both her children. When Misha later spoke of this, he as usual said nothing about his own emotional reactions at the time. Coming across a discussion in the 1990s of the motivations of non-Jews in hiding Jews during the war, he seemed a bit bemused by the question: he had not thought to wonder about Mary’s reasons for doing something obviously right, though risky. In retrospect, however, he regretted not having asked her.

  About a month after Mary’s arrest, Misha had an experience that remained with him as one of the two most traumatic events of the war (the other was the bombing of Dresden in 1945). The musing on this topic is called ‘Mass Graves’, and the graves were those of Jews shot by the Nazis. I will quote it almost in its entirety:

  It was on Easter Sunday, that year which had the extreme winter; I think it was 1943. No sign yet of spring. Deep snow, sunshine. I went skiing in the Shmerl woods, west of Riga, accessible by tram. As appropriate to the day and weather, the ski hut and the environs teemed with Sunday skiers. To evade the crowds I decided to go off in a direction I had not tried before. Indeed, the crowds thinned and soon there was nobody. Quite pleasing. Underbrush a little uncomfortably dense; evidently a rather recently (10 years ago?) re-planted tree stand. It should not last too long, I hoped; underbrush was not standard in these woods, which were quite well-maintained. Indeed, the woods changed to the rather transparent 50-year stand. The topography was that of that area: irregular hills and depressions of 10 to 15 m height, a pleasant cross-country terrain, with practically non-used snow; it was far off the beaten track, with nobody in sight.

  After not too long a chain of hills came into sight; unexpectedly through the gaps between the hills a line of people became visible; families with grandparents and children, all walking like in a procession towards about where I was on the other side of the hills. I proceeded through a gap to their side. A total change: the snow flattened by having been walked over; there were truck tracks; here and there coal and ashes remnants of little fires; here and there empty and half-empty wooden barrels with calcium chlorate. The people went up the hills, and stood around at the tops; I took off the skis and joined them. The size of the top was something like 20 by 20 meters; it had a 10 by 10 by more than 6 m deep square hole, filled to that level with corpses, which were partially covered with calcium chlorate. The holes in the previous hills had already had been covered with earth; on the next hill a new hole already had been started. So that was the Jews’ graveyard.

  I took off, in a state, through the people-free terrain: it must have been an unspecified fear, shock, mental-emotional short-circuit; immense relief emerged as the first person became visible.

  Arriving at the ski hut I collected my stuff and left for home.

  The thought which emerged irrepressibly at that time: what is in their mind, taking the children
to drink in the horror? How is it that this is a Sunday afternoon enjoyment? The distance to the then closest housing is several kilometers, non-trivial, in particular for children.

  ‘So that was the Jews’ graveyard’ suggests that Misha already knew something about the killing of Jews from the Riga ghetto. But to be confronted suddenly by the reality first-hand, and to see the crowds of spectators enjoying it, made that knowledge unendurable. He tried to explain to me, in a postscript to the ‘Mass Graves’ email, how it had affected him. It closed off access to some part of himself, like switching off a light or closing a door. He was most aware of this when he played the piano, particularly Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, because he couldn’t access the emotional depths anymore—‘the playing of the piece remains incomplete, just skimming the surface’. As we shall see, about five years later he thought that this situation had improved, but even forty years later (in 1996), he found that the door was still almost fully closed, with just ‘a crack, allowing a glimpse, but not an entry’. Writing the musing was part of his effort to get the door open again.

  After his encounter with the graves, Misha went straight home and—contrary to his usual habit of keeping things to himself—told his parents about the horrors he had seen. To his surprise, they already knew.

  Olga knew a lot of things, and she also knew a lot of people. The people included German officers, on the one hand, and Jews who had been put in the ghetto, on the other. During the German occupation, she used her contacts with the former to help the latter, making her simultaneously a righteous gentile (though she doesn’t seem to have got on Yad Vashem’s list) and, in a less generous interpretation, a collaborator. Unlike her sister, she didn’t get caught, and it was thanks to one of the Jews she helped that she and Misha would ultimately get to the United States.