by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
Victory was officially celebrated by the British and Americans on 8 May, and by the Soviets on 9 May. This was only the first of many postwar disagreements among the erstwhile allies. Germany was divided into four military occupation zones: American, French, British and Soviet, with the capital, Berlin, similarly divided. Mischka and Olga found themselves in the British zone.
All sorts of people were flocking into Flensburg. For a start, there were high-placed Nazis on the run. Doenitz’s government remained in existence until 23 May, but its last weeks were punctuated by suicides, flights and arrests of Hitler’s top associates. SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who had at the end of April declared himself Hitler’s successor but now accepted Doenitz’s leadership, was in Flensburg briefly before fleeing in disguise and then, two weeks later, killing himself. Propaganda chief Alfred Rosenberg was in hospital nearby, being treated for alcoholism. Doenitz himself, along with Albert Speer, who had been residing in the nearby resort of Glücksburg, was arrested on 23 May, along with all the other remaining members of his government, who surrendered without a fight to the British.
A million German troops in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, where Flensburg was located, were in the process of being put into camps by the Allies as prisoners of war. Allied troops were arriving in droves, and so were refugees. Refugees had been coming to Flensburg by train and boat, and in horse-drawn wagons since the middle of January. By the end of May, the city had taken in 40,000 of them, raising its population (excluding soldiers) to 110,000. The majority of the refugees were Germans coming from the East, but they included 7500 foreigners, mainly Poles and Latvians. Food rations were officially set at 1200 calories a day but in practice were often less.
‘The whole of Europe is mingling in Flensburg’s streets,’ the local newspaper reported in incongruously upbeat terms, as if the city were hosting a carnival, on 30 May 1945:
One sees not only Russians, Poles and Danes but also Belgians, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Greeks, Italians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Luxembourgers, Serbs, Croats and many others walking through Flensburg’s streets.—New troops change the city’s character, the brown-khaki of the English, along with Canadian troops and [illegible] the US army mingle in Flensburg. Never has our beautiful old city sheltered so many people as in these eventful days …
Olga had got to Flensburg in the second week of April, three weeks before the German capitulation—a good time to arrive, as she was one of the early ones. She was billeted—presumably by German authorities, since the Allies had not yet arrived—in Glücksburg on the Flensburg fjord. This was the same place where Doenitz made his residence, though he was in the castle and she in a hotel. But from a refugee perspective, a hotel was a wonderful luxury; most found themselves in barracks and camps. ‘Glücksburg—city of happiness!’ Olga wrote on 14 April. (‘Happiness city’ is the literal meaning of the German name.)
After two days of living in a camp, I have a big beautiful room just for me. My hotel is called Fernblick [‘distant view’]. It fits its name. I can see over the water to Denmark. I would like to stay in these parts and wait to see how things develop.
The trouble was that Mischka, recently released from hospital, wanted to go on to Denmark in the hope of studying physics with the great Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. ‘For his sake,’ Olga continued,
I ought to try to get to Denmark. If everything goes well, I could let him go alone and remain here myself. But perhaps I am just thinking like that this evening because I am so tired of this life of trudging around. Perhaps my strength is not yet exhausted.
Why they didn’t go on to Denmark is not clear: I have a vague memory that Mischka told me that by the time they had met up again and were ready to go, the British had closed the border. At any rate, they stayed in Glücksburg. The next six months seems to have been an empty time for both of them. In her summation in her diary of the year since she had left Riga, Olga described herself as ‘Alone. The whole year’ (she then conscientiously crossed out the last three words and substituted ‘most of the year’; evidently there had been a lover around at one point). Mischka had no way of contacting Nanni because she was now trapped in the Soviet zone in the East, with no inter-zonal postal communication for civilians until October. His thoughts strayed back to Riga: ‘Five years is not a long time, but all the same it’s long enough. Have I changed since then? Who knows. What was going on then with Baby? Was that just childishness? I still have such a warm feeling when I think of it.’ That’s nice because, fifty years later, I took a liking to Helen, aka Baby, too. In August, Mischka met an Estonian nurse, but she petered out, and two weeks later he was musing wistfully that there ought to be a combination of Nanni and two other girlfriends identified only by initials, plus music. This last was a reference to the momentary spiritual connection he had felt with a music-loving man, a stranger to him, who came in and listened when he was playing the piano.
So there was a piano around already; Mischka usually located one pretty soon in a new place. The other thing Mischka always located was the local sports club, and sure enough, there are certificates from the Baltic Sports Society of Flensburg, dated 15 September, of his wins in the 400-metre race, the high jump and the 400-metre relay. That probably wasn’t very high-level competition. Mischka was still feeling the effects of diphtheria, noting in his diary that he got tired very quickly and lacked the physical and mental stamina he had had before. One gets the sense that he was in recessive mode—‘just the son of his mother’, as he was remembered ten years later by one of Olga’s male admirers, a local journalist working as press advisor to the military government. Possibly the mode was even actively antisocial. After Mischka had departed from Flensburg in the winter of 1945–46 to resume his life as a student, a comment in Olga’s first letter suggests this, and perhaps also tensions between the two of them: ‘It’s true, God help me, that you are constantly working, even at the cost of your fellow men. That I can state under oath.’ She hoped that after the move, ‘you can finally get on a friendly footing with them [his fellow men]’.
When inter-zonal postal service reopened in the autumn, Mischka wrote a letter without an addressee (probably to Nanni) on his ‘relaxing summer’ at Glücksburg. This seems not to have been ironic, though with Mischka you never know. It was as if it were any old summer holiday at a seaside resort. No mention of war occupation, refugees, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (later a major issue for him) or even his own bout of diphtheria. The only other information that he gave about his life was that ‘I worked this summer as a radio repairman for the occupation authorities, as a result of which I got rations—English Army rations.’ That, of course, was worth noting in these hungry years.
Despite his diary’s silence on the British occupiers, Mischka developed a dislike for them that coloured his attitude to England for the rest of his life. As he remembered in the 1990s,
The Eisenhower edict was: ‘no fraternization with the population’. The British forces stuck to that edict. The officers added to it arrogance, aloofness. They did not see the person standing in front of them; be that a German (the ex-enemy) or a DP, the so-to-say person liberated by them.
‘So to say’ is Mischka’s sarcastic way of conveying that in the British officers’ eyes, the DP was not a person. That was certainly true of some of the Western occupiers. The maverick US military commander General Patton made no secret of the fact that he regarded DPs as subhuman—particularly, but not only, Jewish DPs. As one official of UNRRA reported in 1946, ‘formerly the DP was looked upon as a person unfortunate enough to have been a slave of the Nazis, but today he is generally considered primarily as a Blackmarketeer, a criminal or loafer, who does not want to return to his own country but prefers to settle into the easy existence of being cared for by the Army and UNRRA’. The Germans hated DPs, regarding them (especially the Poles and Russians) as a bunch of criminals and layabouts and resenting their privileged status with regard to rations. The DP was not a person yo
u would want to marry your daughter or your occupation army son.
To be sure, DPs from the Baltic states were generally regarded as higher than the Slavs in the chain of being— ‘splendid people whose camps are clean, bright and civilized’, wrote one UNRRA official enthusiastically to the Manchester Guardian. But the downside was that they were also collectively more suspected than the Poles of having been Nazi collaborators. By the spring of 1945, Britain and the United States had decided that they did not recognise the Soviet absorption of the Baltic states in 1940, and hence did not regard Latvians as subject to mandatory repatriation to the Soviet Union, but many in UNRRA and the occupation governments retained a suspicion of them as Nazi collaborators who had voluntarily left with the Germans, particularly if they had served under German command in the Latvian Legion or Waffen-SS. Mischka was not in the latter category, though some of his Latvian friends like Bičevskis were, but it was also true that he and Olga did not fall into the ‘victim’ category of persons forcibly taken to Germany as slave labour. There is no indication, however, either in the contemporary documents or in subsequent retellings, that Olga and Mischka were ever even slightly worried about being sent back to Latvia, suspected of collaboration or deprived of UNRRA protection.
Although DPs were low on the social totem pole, the formal status of DP was greatly coveted because it carried good rations, guaranteed housing and medical care. The definition of a DP eligible for UNRRA care was someone whose displacement was the result of war and fascism. That excluded other categories of refugees, such as the millions of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) streaming out of Eastern Europe, finding themselves, after the war, no longer welcome in the countries where their families had often lived for centuries, or Baltic Germans, like Baby Klumberg’s family, who had responded to the Fuhrer’s call to return to the homeland in the late 1930s and early ‘40s. (That’s how it was in principle; in practice, Baby and many others seem to have merged with the general crowd of Baltic DPs who had left a few years later.) When, sometime in 1946, Mischka composed the apologia that he submitted to the British, explaining the circumstances in which he had come to Germany, noting his aunt’s arrest by the Nazis and stressing that ‘none of us three brothers has been a single day in the German Army’, it was a possible suspicion of pro-Nazi leanings that he was implicitly refuting.
As time passed, and the Cold War gathered momentum, the working definition of DP changed and DPs came to be seen primarily as victims of Communism rather than Nazism (since the homelands they had left were either under or coming under Communist regimes). This made the question of wartime collaboration less relevant and was generally to the advantage of Baltic DPs because of their reputation for strong anti-Communism. In the late 1940s, when resettlement selection committees were vigilant on the question of Communist or Soviet sympathies, Mischka never had to defend himself against suspicion of pro-Communism because, as a Latvian, he was simply assumed to be an anti-Communist nationalist.
A DP registration card, number G21295530, was issued on 1 August 1945 in the name of Mikelis Danos and renewed on four occasions up to February 1946. It would be nice to present this as his definitive card of identity in the new life, but in fact two other DP cards in the ‘G’ series have survived, one in the name of Mikelis, the other in the name of Michael Danos. In addition, there was a fourth card, with the registration number A02054732 and in the name of Michael Danos, probably issued in the US zone, which we will come to later. DP life was full of identity documents and screenings, but this contributed as much to the multiplication of identities as to their clarification. For displaced persons—even honest ones like Mischka—nothing was set in stone: names and nationalities were fluid; identities were provisional, depending on demand.
As DPs go, Olga and Mischka were in a good position. Olga had arrived in Flensburg and found a niche there before the great influx of refugees from the East. They were Latvians, but not tainted by association with the Waffen-SS and Latvian Legion. They spoke good German and some English. They were a family unit of two active adults with no dependants. And, above all, they were in the British occupation zone, not the Soviet one, as they would have been had they stayed in the Dresden area.
Nanni, as a native German, citizen of a defeated country, had fewer advantages. In the first place, the fact that she was a German, not a DP, meant that she was ineligible for UNRRA protection, even if she became a refugee. In the second place, living with her parents, sister and brother and working in her father’s medical practice on the outskirts of Chemnitz, she found herself in the Soviet zone, ‘with all the joy of dealing with the Russians’, as she wrote to Mischka in November. She and her sister had thought of fleeing to the American zone, but didn’t, probably because of a sense of obligation to their parents and schoolboy brother. Life was hard, with food problems, coal shortages and transport interruptions; it was so cold that Nanni could only play the piano for five minutes at a time. She should have spent more time in Misha’s Dresden apartment on Planettastrasse, she wrote sadly, to get in practice for freezing. If only there was some chance to play sport; if only she could continue her studies. It was a brave letter, but if only ran through it like a basso ostinato. In February, Nanni wrote again several times, mentioning hopes, which were later disappointed, that the Soviets would open the borders of their zone. When the anniversary of the Dresden bombing came round, she reminded Mischka that this was ‘Dresden’s deathday and our second birthday’. Mischka no doubt remembered this anniversary, but he also remembered that a couple of weeks later Nanni had opted to stay in Chemnitz instead of coming with him to Flensburg. When Olga asked about Nanni, as she periodically did in the months to come, Mischka’s responses were reserved and his comments sometimes critical.
If Nanni was still trapped in Chemnitz, Mischka was about to make his escape from Flensburg back into real life, meaning life with a purpose. He was determined to resume his engineering studies. As Misha told me his life story in the 1990s, there was simply a gap—nothing worth reporting—between the events of February and March 1945 (the Dresden bombing and diphtheria episode) and his decision to leave Flensburg in October. The purpose of that October trip was to find a German university to enrol in. This became possible once civilian travel on trains was allowed again and universities reopened. He liked telling the story of this trip: it was back to the Dick Whittington mode, the young man with his knapsack on his back, off on the road again to make his fortune after a brief involuntary diversion. He was a person again, not just a displaced one. He was taking charge of his own destiny. And, on top of that, he was getting a bird’s-eye view of Germany, from north to south to west (but not east) as it tentatively emerged from the ashes.
Mischka had done a year or so of electrical engineering in Riga and then another two semesters in Dresden, but he hadn’t had time to finish. The universities had all been closed at the time of the Allied occupation in the spring and started reopening in the autumn, Göttingen being the first on 17 September. Starting in mid October, Mischka was scouring ‘all the technical universities in the British and American zones’, as he wrote to Nanni, to find out which was open and suitable. The chronology is hard to establish from his letters, but he seems to have arrived in Brunswick in the British zone in the last week of October. He reported to Olga that the technical university was in ‘passable’ condition, and that a professor there, the well-regarded high-frequency expert Leo Pungs, who knew Barkhausen, was willing to take him as a student. Mischka was obviously pleased to have established a rapport with this ‘not unknown’ (that is, famous) scientist who—although Mischka did not report this—had been a major figure in radar technology during the war. They spoke in Russian, suggesting a degree of personal rapprochement given Mischka’s perfect German and the fact that Professor Pungs, though Russian-born, had lived in Germany for the past forty-five years.
For all Mischka’s high regard for Professor Barkhausen, returning to Dresden to continue his studies was out of the question
because it was in the Soviet zone. The institute had been destroyed in the Dresden bombing of February 1945, as Mischka had observed at a distance too close for comfort. Barkhausen and his wife had taken refuge with relatives outside the city after the bombing, although Mischka probably didn’t know this. Unlike many other professors from the Soviet zone, Barkhausen didn’t flee west but returned to Dresden in June 1946 to preside over the rebuilding of his institute, and remained there for the rest of his life. But the rebuilding came too late for Mischka, who would in any case not have contemplated relocating to the Soviet occupation zone. At one point, Mischka seems to have considered risking a visit to the East, to see Nanni and pick up a suitcase left with his Dresden landlady, but finally thought better of it.
He was not, however, confining his search for universities to the British zone, where he was registered as a DP. Early in November, he went to inspect Munich in the American zone. He had left some things there as well, evidently on his trip in the winter of 1944–45 and, as on the previous visit, was struck by the beauty of Southern Germany. ‘If only the school were better,’ he wrote to Olga, ‘I would stay there despite everything, because it’s beautiful.’
