by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
Her sons knew about both these activities, more or less, although for their own protection she didn’t tell them any details about what she was doing for Jews. Basically she had turned her fashion atelier into a tailoring workshop, where, under contract with the German Army, she made suspenders and straw sandals, employing a dozen or so Jews from the ghetto, whom she was able, at a minimum version of the story (Arpad Jr’s), to feed and, at a maximum (Olga’s own), to extract and smuggle out of the country.
As Olga told a reporter on the Miami Herald in 1954, she assisted in saving and hiding what she describes as ‘an army of refugees,’ during several years work, being arrested only once, and detained that time for a single day. Her scheme was to contract to supply 60,000 pairs of suspenders for the German army, and on the strength of that to get passes to fly to Prague over-frequently ‘for materials.’ Arrangements for hiding, feeding, and passing on the refugees were made during these Prague visits. Many of them she also employed surreptitiously in the ‘factory.’ She never actually supplied more than a few thousand of the article contracted for.
I don’t know how close this story is to the literal truth. Her sons Misha and Jan knew about her employing, helping and supporting Jews, but not about smuggling them out; her son Arpad told me that her Jewish workers were escorted to and from the ghetto in convoy, but sometimes one managed to disappear without either Olga or her contact getting into trouble. He didn’t know anything about any further arrangements to save them she may have made. On the face of it, landlocked Prague was a surprising way station for smuggling out Jews, but certainly Olga did go there on business during the war, as well as to a number of other cities in the greater Reich; according to Jan, she was importing Czech glass and medicine from Prague. The one Jewish protégé I have been able to trace—her later US immigration sponsor, Simon Mirkin— was not smuggled out but, after surviving ‘selections’ in the Riga ghetto thanks to Olga’s help, served a short term in the Stutthof concentration camp in the waning days of the war and ended up liberated by the Americans in Germany. Simon was the son of a prosperous Jewish businessman—probably a prewar acquaintance of Olga’s—who was also protected by her and survived Stutthof but died in Buchenwald in February 1945. The young Mirkin later suggested that the whole Mirkin family was at one point living in Olga’s workshop.
As Misha remembered, Olga was able to help the Jews because of the collusion of two anti-Nazi German officers with whom she had become friendly:
Herr Major v. Koelln was Kommandant of the Riga airport, Spilve. By now the airport has been moved twice. Spilve’s runways were grass; that was fine with the WW2 planes; all of them could land there. The background of v. K. was German Nobility; he was born in St Petersburg, son of the then ambassador of the then Kaiser Wilhelm to the then Tzar. Herr Seeliger was of humble origins, blue collar worker family. His position in Riga was also of different kind; he was commandant of the Riga Ghetto; it contained besides the not insignificant number of Riga Jews, which still made up the minority, a significantly larger number of imports, principally from Austria. Each of them did whatever they could, to keep alive as many as possible of their charges, POWs by v. K; Jews by S. A deadly balancing act. In particular for S.
‘Von Koelln’ becomes ‘Koellner’ in Olga’s letters after the war, when she encountered him as a hotel porter in Wiesbaden and commented that ‘he is no more a true porter than he was a true airbase commander’ in Riga. I can find no record of a man with either of these names serving as airbase commander, but not much information is easily available about airbase personnel, so he may have done. The Riga ghetto is another matter, as it has been extensively documented in memoirs and scholarly studies. They name the ghetto commandant, and he was not Seeliger. Since the name in this case is unambiguous, Seeliger was presumably working in the German ghetto administration but lower down in the administrative chain.
For reasons which I never knew, never asked about, and was not told, my parents knew both of them, evidently quite well. They visited our apartment, separately, more than once; besides saying Good Evening, my presence was not desired.
Nonetheless, my mother thought it prudent to tell me a little about these people. The main point was that they were deeply, violently, anti-Nazi. Evidently they did not hold back in venting their feelings during these visits. I am sure they used different language in these explanations. I do not know how come they felt this confidence, but they did. I also knew better than to ask; whatever I was told I listened to.
This image of himself listening and watching, without being really drawn in, often recurred in Misha’s stories about the war. In lighter contexts, he would throw in a proverbial Russian expression of insouciance, ‘Vas’ka slushaet, da est’ (‘Vas’ka listens, but goes on eating’). Here Misha is not insouciant, but he is very emphatically only a listener, an observer and not a participant of action. Nevertheless, he knew both the Germans well enough to be sent greetings in a letter from Seeliger to Olga in 1951, and also to form his own impression of their ability to act for good from within an institutional setting with quite different purposes. Seeliger, he thought, was a fairly simple character who saved lives when he could and felt more satisfaction at his success in saving some individual lives than distress at the killing of many other Jews for which, by virtue of his official job, he was also responsible. Von Koelln, an intellectual, had more complex reactions: his ‘limited success in saving a few lives’ (by keeping POWs from being executed) afforded him less satisfaction because he was ‘evidently more bothered by general inhumaneness’. Misha assumed that in staying within the system, both were affected by the general logic that ‘if I don’t do it then that, or that, or that guy will, and he is real bad news’.
Olga was not particularly inclined to introspection (except, in her diary, about her sentimental life), and her motives for helping Jews—and for using her contact with friendly Germans as a way of doing so—went essentially undiscussed. In the 1954 newspaper interview, she explained to the American reporter that, although not Jewish herself, she had helped the Jews ‘because I found it so ugly a situation’. Evidently it seemed to her, as to Misha, an obvious thing to do, for reasons of simple humanity, as long as she could get away with it. It would also have been obvious to her, though perhaps not to Misha, that the best way to get away with it, as well as secure her and her family’s position in general, was to have some protection within German officialdom.
Koelln’s and Seeliger’s visits were evidently made to the Danos family apartment, although it seems that as a result of the marital separation, Olga was no longer actually living there but in her workshop in the old city. Thus Arpad Sr was involved in these contacts (as Misha’s comments confirm), but we know even less about his motives and reactions than about Olga’s. Later, when Olga was trying to get her oldest and youngest son out of Latvia as the Soviet Army approached in 1944, Arpad Sr seems to have approved her plans but assumed that initiatives of this kind belonged to her sphere of action rather than his. Perhaps it was the same here. If we factor in his being at least half Jewish, and Olga possibly having an affair with (the anti-Nazi Nazi) Seeliger, the complexities are multiplied, no doubt a salutary reminder that all marriages are complicated, and this one more than most.
None of Olga’s sons seem to have been surprised by her (or Mary’s) actions in trying to save Jews or to have thought they needed special explanation. As Misha wrote later, ‘At that time it seemed the most natural thing to do; it never even occurred to me to see any problem in that action, or to ask anybody about any motivations,’ and his brothers, interviewed in the 2000s, seemed to feel the same. As far as the purpose of the action (saving Jews) is concerned, I’m sure this is an accurate report of his feelings at the time. About his reaction to the means Olga used, I’m not so sure. Olga’s shrewd world-liness and optimistic interventionist instincts were not part of her son’s make-up. He never hinted at any uneasiness about his mother’s connections with the German officers, either t
o me or in his correspondence with her in Germany, when she ran across both of them again. But that goes almost without saying, since he virtually never questioned or criticised any of her actions. Yet all his life, Misha made a point of not cultivating people with power, often to his detriment. Whether he recognised it or not, his instincts here were very different from Olga’s approach.
With regard to Olga’s cultivation of German officials and Misha’s reaction to it, Helen Machen, the former Baby Klumberg, provided an interesting vignette. Helen had gone with her family to Germany with the Baltic Germans in 1941, but came back on her own to Riga a year or so later. Shortly after her return (as she related in a conversation with me in 2008), she went round to look for Misha at the house his family were then living in and found a lively party in full swing. Misha’s mother was there (she didn’t see any sign of his father) and some German officers. There was an element of unspoken disapproval in Helen’s account, though I couldn’t be sure of what: not fraternisation, surely, since Helen herself had been working happily enough for a nice Nazi official since her return to Riga; perhaps the milieu was a bit bohemian for her? Anyway, she didn’t see Misha at the party, asked for him, and was told that he was up in his room, not feeling well. Baby went up (nobody offered to take her) and found him in bed, depressed but not apparently sick. He was pleased to see her but did not tell her what was bothering him.
Of course there were a lot of things that could have prevented him being in a party mood that night. One perennial cause of anxiety and melancholy was his personal life, as we can see from his diary (a useful reminder that this is often what people are actually thinking about when, as historians, we expect them to be contemplating the big historic events like war and displacement). Another one was military conscription.
All three Danos brothers were of call-up age, and none of them wanted to serve in the German Army (Waffen-SS). Jan was the first one in real trouble. Called up for military service in the autumn of 1943, he failed to appear before the mobilisation commission and went into hiding for a month but was caught and imprisoned for six months. He became ill with pleurisy in prison and in February 1944 was released from prison to hospital. After his recovery, he was again liable for the draft and again went into hiding. Arpad, meanwhile, was safe, at least for the time being, as a worker in an aviation factory, a protected occupation.
Misha came before the mobilisation commission a couple of months later, on 9 December 1943. He was told that he was temporarily excused but would be drafted at the next call-up. His temporary protection was probably that he was back working as a radio technician at VEF on a labour draft, but this was not going to be enough to keep him out of the army for long. In the spring of 1944, he (or Olga) discovered a way of beating the draft: to go to Germany as an exchange student.
Misha’s laconic description of these events is contained in an undated statement, written in English in 1946 in Hanover, probably for some kind of political screening process by the British military authorities. I have left his English uncorrected; the German phrase in parenthesis is his:
I remained in Riga til the end of May, 1944. Then I had passed a mobilization commission which took place December, 9th 1943, and where I had been excused from mobilization up til the next order (bis zum nächsten Befehl).
Beginning with 1942 it was possible each semester for ca 10 students of the University of Riga to continue their studies at an University in Germany. In April, 1944 I asked the german authorities the permission to go to an University in Germany. I did so for the following reasons:
a) I had been excused once from mobilization in December, 1943, and it was clear that at the next commission I would be mobilized,
b) The german eastern front was collapsing and nobody could tell how long a time it would take the russians to conquer Riga.
Both reasons a) and b) were urgent enough to try to get away from Riga. At that time the only other possibility to do so was to volunteer to work in Germany. By asking the permission to go as a student I tried to escape both from mobilization and the Russians without helping the germans in a single way to make war.
I got the permission to go to Dresden in the middle of May without any political screening. Would the Germans have done so they would not have let me go my aunt being in concentration camp and with the precendent of my yunger brother …
Finally, I would like to remark that none of us three brothers has been a single day in the german army.
This part of Misha’s story of his life, when told to me for the first time, took my breath away. How could he have dared to go to Germany, throwing himself into the lion’s den? The explanation given in the 1945 statement is pretty well how he explained it to me in 1989: if he stayed, he would be called up; if he went to Germany, he wouldn’t be. It makes perfect sense, assuming he didn’t know about the Jewish grandparent(s). The residual astonishment I have focusses on Olga, who surely must have known that Misha had a Jewish grandmother. But when I think about it, that makes sense too. The Danoses’ files were in Riga, and if Arpad Sr were ever denounced as a Jew, that was where it was going to happen. Anywhere not Riga was arguably safer.
After Misha’s death, I tried to find out more about this student exchange between Latvia and Germany and became increasingly sceptical that such a thing ever existed. Neither Misha’s friend Andrej Bičevskis nor his wife Anna, both members of the Latvian DP community in Germany after the war, had ever heard of anyone besides Misha who had gone from Riga to a German university on an exchange during the war. Andrej thought it had to have been a special deal that Olga, with her contacts, had organised, and another Riga friend, Dailonis Stauvers, thought the same.
DPs lied to the authorities all the time about their origins, movements and relations with the Germans, as I knew from my own archival research for a separate project; it was part of their survival strategy. I started to think that even Misha, in general a very truthful man, was gilding the lily a bit. But I shouldn’t have doubted him. The story he told the British occupation authorities turned out to be true.
I discovered the existence of a formal exchange in an obscure German scholarly monograph. Latvians were relatively high up on the Germans’ racial scale, and it seems that the Germans were interested in such an exchange in order to promote Germanisation via the dispatch of German professors of literature and the like to the Baltics, as well as the sending of Latvian students to Germany to further their exposure to German culture and language. Misha even gave the correct year for its establishment. The exchange covered engineering, medicine and law as well as the humanities. Apparently the initial response of Baltic students was tepid: only about a hundred Latvians and Estonians, including Misha, went to study in Germany during the war. Why it wasn’t more widely noticed as a way of dodging the draft is not clear. Very likely, noticing it was Olga’s achievement, and she may also have pulled some strings to get Misha on the list.
One thing that surprised me in Misha’s story, although as a historian I probably should have known it, was how early the Danos family concluded that Germany was going to lose the war and the Baltic states would be reoccupied by the Soviet Union. This may have been part of Olga’s strategy, even in the first months of 1944, when Misha’s participation in the exchange must have been organised. At that point, the Soviet Army had already won back most of their own territory (excluding the Baltic states) that the Germans had occupied and were preparing for a summer offensive to clear the Germans out of Eastern Europe. The Allies landed in Normandy in the summer and started pressing eastward. By the autumn, the Baltic states had been reoccupied by the Soviets, moving steadily westward. Olga wanted her sons and herself out of Latvia, to avoid falling under Soviet rule, and Germany was not the destination but a way station in her plans. The idea was to go west, which of course meant going into and through Germany, with the aim of ending up as close as possible to a western border in the hope of crossing into Allied territory when the final defeat came. Misha was the first to go, i
n the spring of 1944. The rest of the family (except Misha’s father) would try to follow him westwards, with varying success.
5
Wartime Germany
Arpad Danos, ‘der Alte’, 1944. Photograph enclosed in his last letter to Olga.
IT must have been towards the end of April 1944 that Misha set off to study in Germany (and, in my story, now becomes Mischka), for Olga was fretting about not having received a letter from him on 2 May. When a letter finally came ten days later, reporting that various last-minute problems had been solved, its mood was buoyant and confident. This wasn’t the passive ‘Vas’ka who listens’ while his mother makes the important decisions, but a new take-charge, now-I-am-an-adult Mischka. Of course, he might well have been in a good mood: five years earlier, he had wanted to go to Germany and had been prevented, and now he had made it, albeit with a less sanguine view of Germans as a result of the occupation. The way it comes across from his letters, it wasn’t so much going to Germany that now excited him but rather setting off on his first adventure on his own. When he later told me the story of his wanderings in Europe, it had a fairytale cadence and I immediately pictured him as Dick Whittington in the children’s rhyme, off to London with his bundle on his back to make his fortune. Olga saw his departure in similar terms, and gave him appropriate sage advice. Speaking of her great hopes of him, she wrote on 20 May:
