Mischka's War

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

  Helga Heimers was the other thing on Mischka’s mind. Five years his junior, she was the daughter of a solid Protestant, North German family (her father was director of a school for the blind). In terms of athletics, she was a sprinter as well as a hurdler and long jumper. At first Mischka didn’t pay any particular attention to her because she looked so young (his previous girlfriends from the sports club were older and more worldly and experienced). Helga, for her part, had already taken note of him as a lively and popular member of the club, admired for his personal qualities as well as his excellence as a pole vaulter (within the sports club, evidently, his being a DP was not a social handicap). Helga was surprised and flattered when Mischka turned his attention to her. It happened on a bicycle trip, probably in the summer of 1948, to Hamburg, Lübeck and the Baltic coast. The person she fell in love with, as she later remembered, was light-hearted and fun to be with, the life of any party. He was also unconventional, which was both appealing to Helga and sometimes embarrassing, and critical of German formality, including that of her family. The qualities in Helga that Mischka stressed in his letters to Olga were her youth (and, by implication, her innocence and impressionableness) and her appreciation of music and painting. She had the same hatred of German rigidity as he had, he told his mother optimistically: she just hadn’t previously realised, for lack of experience of the wider world, that this rigidity was a specifically German trait. The other good thing about Helga, conveyed to Olga by Mischka in particularly convoluted prose, was that she loved him.

  Mischka seems to have made up his mind to marry Helga in the early spring of 1949, perhaps in response to her plans to go to England as an au pair for a year (on in January, cancelled late April or May). Like all his major decisions, as he wrote in a letter to her parents, the decision to marry was made suddenly, but on the basis of ‘earth that was already ploughed’. He took Helga to meet Olga around Easter. This seems to have been only a qualified success. Helga wasn’t sure that Olga thought she was good enough for Mischka and felt envious of, and no doubt excluded by, the close understanding between mother and son. She wasn’t altogether happy when, in Olga’s next letter to Mischka, she sent her greetings to ‘little Helga’ (die kleine Helga), which Helga took as a bit of a putdown. (Olga switched to a different diminutive, Helgalein, after Mischka passed that on.) As Mischka’s move from Hanover to Heidelberg came closer, he informed Olga, without further elaboration, that ‘the probability that I will be taking the young lady (Jungfrau) with me continues to grow’—that is, that they were planning to get married. Olga replied slightly tartly (‘If I understand you rightly, you want to take the young lady with you’) with an abstract disquisition on the difficulties of choosing the right life partner, ending with the observation that

  at least one of the two partners must have their eyes open [sehend sein]. In your case, it must be the wife, so that you can live up to your talents and bring them to fruition. For both your sakes I hope that Helga brings enough strength to the task.

  By extraordinarily unfortunate timing, Mischka’s decision to marry Helga coincided with Nanni’s long-delayed departure from the Soviet zone to the West. I found it hard to read her increasingly less hopeful letters to Mischka without wincing, but it wasn’t only Nanni I felt sorry for. The first mention of a planned departure is in a letter from Mischka to Olga, evidently written in August or September 1948, where he reported that ‘Nanni was here’ and that ‘she has become independent and wants to move to the Western zone’. (The approving tone suggests that at this point he was not yet in too deep with Helga.) As of January 1949, however, she was still sitting at home in Chemnitz waiting impatiently for departure to become possible (the nature of the obstacles are not spelt out), congratulating Mischka on his new job and urging him to work hard (‘Genius equals hard work [Fleisse]. Otherwise you’ll never get to America!’). By the beginning of April, she had reached Göttingen in the British zone, after a traumatic two-week imprisonment in the Soviet zone en route, and with rather forced cheerfulness suggested that if Mischka found himself in the area, he might come and see her; she couldn’t come to him in Hanover just yet because she had no money, and anyway ‘it doesn’t behove a woman to visit a man’. She was working as a housemaid, but that didn’t matter: ‘in America lots of people start off washing dishes’. If he heard of any work for a chemical technician, he should let her know. But above all, he should write. He didn’t, so on 14 April she wrote again, this time without sending greetings to his mother as in the earlier letter, and signing herself formally ‘Marianne Schuster’ instead of Nanni. ‘No doubt you have so much work that there is no leisure for private life. Should it be so, you are forgiven … If it’s a woman that is the obstacle, you are forgiven as well. But you could let me hear from you anyway, I won’t be jealous and would only rejoice in your happiness, or do you begrudge me that?’

  Mischka did reply to that letter, evidently sticking to a light tone and steering clear of awkward topics or too many specifics. In her reply on 9 May, Nanni commented rather acidly on a joke (recycled from an earlier letter to Olga) about his landlady and daughter constituting ‘1.5 women’, hoping that ‘you are having a lot of fun with your 1.5’. She was in Reutlingen in the French zone by this time, intending to go on to the Swabian university town of Tübingen. Mischka must have emphasised his (long-term) emigration plans, perhaps to indicate non-availability, because she wished him well with them, adding that she herself preferred to stay in Germany where she had the credentials to finish her education—and ‘in any case’, she added, ‘I am a hateful “German”’, thus ineligible for the IRO resettlement available for DPs. She hoped that in his next letter he would ‘express himself somewhat more concretely, since it sometimes remains a riddle to me’.

  Mischka must finally have promised to come to Tübingen to see her, for she wrote again on 16 June discussing possible dates. As far as I can tell, this meeting never took place. Instead, Mischka had some kind of nervous collapse that brought Helga hurrying to his side and had her parents sending him off to a ‘nerve doctor’ to determine if his health was sound enough for him to marry.

  The specific episode, a ‘mild fit on waking up’, occurred when he was away on a sports trip in the middle of June. In contemporary terminology, he seems to have been suffering from panic attacks. Helga remembers that he sometimes had to get off a crowded tram to recover from such an attack, and at her parents’ place had had fits of uncontrollable shaking when he had to lie down, frightening himself and the Heimers. Since he had arrived in Heidelberg, he had been prone to get ‘nervous’ in the evening when he was tired, expressed in ‘a feeling of light internal shaking’. Describing his symptoms to the Heimers’ Dr Malkus, evidently a psychiatrist, he referred to ‘the mistrust of myself’ and sense of insecurity that occurred at such moments, ‘in which I am frightened by this anxiety and become more anxious’. Mischka attributed this to ‘nerves’, which he had to try to strengthen. He was shocked when, in response to his question about whether there was any impediment to his marriage, Dr Malkus failed to provide the expected reassurance but instead suggested waiting for a month to see how his condition developed. After the month had elapsed, he evidently gave the go-ahead, and Mischka wrote to Helga on 27 June to say that, being confirmed in his opinion that his symptoms were just ‘nervousness’ in a basically healthy person, he saw ‘no ground why we shouldn’t get married as quickly as possible’.

  Olga, meanwhile, had reacted with a mixture of reassurance and astringent commonsense. ‘I know these gentlemen,’ she wrote. ‘Nerve doctors are the biggest charlatans.’ To make Mischka wait for a month before passing him as fit for marriage was ‘unforgiveable rubbish—what difference would a month make?’—and could have no result but to upset the patient:

  You have been assessed as having sensitive nerves. You had scarcely emerged from puberty (and one doesn’t know how long the afterlife of that is) when you were hit with a mass of [upsetting] experiences … and you had t
o deal with them with weakened bodily capacity for resistance. So the nerves were under ever greater strain, until finally the tension was continuous, if also not always consciously, and it was not possible to relax. If tension becomes too great, there is going to be a moment when control weakens and they give way. In yourself, you are a healthy man and what can stand in the way of your marriage? I would even expect there to be a certain nervous tension, along with spiritual wellbeing, associated with being together with the person you love …

  She recommended long walks, breathing exercises, more sleep and a better diet (more butter).

  It looks as if Mischka, untypically, hadn’t yet told Olga about Nanni’s reappearance, no doubt because the whole subject was too painful. But after a while he did, and he also gave her a wry paraphrase of Nanni’s response when he finally informed her (probably after the fact) about his marriage to Helga. Nanni’s letter was ‘very decent’, he said. She gave him the slightly barbed advice that being unfaithful to his wife was the main potential danger, but otherwise ‘seemed to assume that I possessed in reasonable measure the other qualities necessary for a successful marriage’. Olga replied staunchly that Nanni (whose side she was not going to take against her son, even if she liked her) had not got it quite right: ‘You have all the qualities to make a happy marriage.’

  On the eve of his marriage in August, Mischka sent his prospective in-laws a statement of his qualifications as a husband and his attitude to the marriage. It started off ordinarily enough with a survey of his current position, salary and prospects. The path to an academic chair (highly prestigious in Germany) lay open before him, and although ‘I have not firmly decided that I will necessarily be a professor,’ he would probably take it. Science was his life, and he had pursued it systematically, even if from the outside his course might seem to encompass a number of quantum leaps. Marriage to Helga was another of those quantum leaps, but as he stated in one of his favourite negative statements of a positive, ‘I am not very sceptical about Helga’s and my life together’. Conceding that people tend not to be sceptical at the beginning of a marriage, he cited his own powers of ‘objectivity and self-criticism’ in support of his non-scepticism (optimism?) about the marriage and concluded that for it to break down, ‘both parties would have to behave stupidly, or one party would have to behave very stupidly’. There was nothing in the letter about being a DP and a foreigner who was likely to take their daughter away from Germany.

  Whether or not the letter was reassuring for Helga’s parents, they accepted the inevitability of the marriage and put a good face on it. On 4 August 1949, the scientific assistant and engineering graduate Michael Danos, of the Orthodox faith, born in Riga, Latvia, on 10 January 1922, married the student Helga Dorothea Helene Luise Heimers, of the Lutheran-Evangelical confession, born on 14 June 1927 in Hanover. The church marriage followed an earlier civil ceremony in Heidelberg (chosen over Hanover because the Americans required less documentation than the British). The Hanover wedding was largely a Heimer family affair, but of course Olga was there, cutting a fine figure in a dress she had made herself. Judging by the photographs, not only was the bride beautiful and blushing, but so was the groom. Herr and Frau Michael Danos had made their debut.

  11

  Olga’s Departure

  Olga with Simon Mirkin on her arrival in New York, November 1950. Contemporary press photo, courtesy of Barry Mirkin.

  OF Mischka’s old friends from Riga and Hanover, only Dailonis Stauvers was at his wedding. The rest had scattered to all corners of the earth or would soon do so. Bičevskis had gone to Australia; others were off to Canada, Chile, Venezuela, Boston and New York. Stauvers himself was probably already planning his departure to the United States, which took place in 1951. The exodus had started two years before Mischka’s marriage, and the Danoses’ correspondence now regularly contained news of friends departing or planning to depart to Brazil, Holland, South Africa and Palestine. Simon Mirkin, Olga’s Riga protégé, was one of the first to go, leaving for the United States in mid 1947. He was able to get in early because he worked for the Jewish refugee organisation HIAS and the American occupation authorities. Olga’s sister Mary was also putting in an application for the United States, the most popular of all destinations for DPs, as were her former husband Paul Sakss and his new wife. Some people had problems with visas and selection by the country of their first choice. But, inexorably, the transient DP communities established in the wake of the war were starting to unravel.

  These mass departures were made possible by a new Allied approach to solving the DP problem. The mission of the old international refugee authority, UNRRA, had been to repatriate as many DPs as possible, while looking after those remaining in Europe who were unwilling or unable to repatriate, until someone could work out what to do with them. Political motives were usually cited for the DPs’ unwillingness to return, although undoubtedly many from the East, with its historically lower living standards than Western Europe, had unspoken economic motives as well. The ‘non-repatriables’ included most of the DPs from the Baltic states, Olga’s and Mischka’s compatriots, who did not regard the Soviet Union as their homeland. With their shattered economies, Germany in particular and the European nations in general were not in a position to absorb more than a small proportion of the DPs. The doors to the United States, where many DPs wanted to go, remained largely shut during UNRRA’s reign, and Britain was trying to block movement of Jewish DPs to Palestine, another favoured destination. So for several years after the war, the ultimate fate of the non-repatriated DPs was uncertain.

  The IRO (International Refugee Organization), which replaced UNRRA as custodian of the DPs in 1947, had a new plan. This was in effect to give up on the idea of repatriation and move swiftly towards mass resettlement of DPs outside Europe. In 1948, the US Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act providing for large-scale entry, albeit with a complicated system of preferences and restrictions and the requirement that DPs have a local sponsor. Australia, Canada, Argentina and other Latin American countries with labour shortages indicated a willingness to take their share. The system was that DPs recorded their resettlement preferences with IRO but then had to apply to the individual countries and pass a medical, occupational and political vetting by their selection committees. The political vetting was initially to prevent entry of Nazi collaborators and war criminals, but as the Cold War took hold, blocking Communists and Communist sympathisers came to seem equally important.

  Olga and, from 1949, Mischka were off the IRO’s ‘care and maintenance’ list as a result of ‘going on to the German economy’, but they were still eligible for IRO resettlement if they cared to take up the opportunity. Whether they wanted to leave Germany and resettle was the first question they had to decide. If the answer was yes, the next questions were where they wanted to go, and which countries were ready to take them.

  As Latvians, Mischka and Olga ranked relatively high on the preference list of the resettlement countries, which tended (like the Nazis) to prefer blue-eyed Northern Europeans to Poles and other Slavic groups. Australia, for example, put Latvians right at the top of its mass resettlement scheme, and the United States regarded them as desirable too. The potential problem for Latvians was suspicion of wartime collaboration, particularly by those who had volunteered to fight with the Germans in the Latvian Legion or the Waffen-SS, but the Danoses were not in that category. On the other hand, the preference of most of the receiving countries for young, healthy manual workers did not favour the Danoses. Young professionals and ‘brain-workers’ among the DPs were in less demand as immigrants, even if they had finished their education in Germany courtesy of UNRRA; if they got through the selection, they couldn’t count on getting jobs that fitted their qualifications, and some found it advisable to fudge their biographies and present themselves to the selection committees as builders’ labourers or domestic servants. Older professionals, especially those in less than perfect health, were often shunned by selection
committees, along with sufferers of TB and syphilis and the disabled. Most selection committees favoured a cut-off age of around forty-five for DP immigrants, which was a potential problem for Olga, who turned fifty in 1947. Fortunately, she had had the forethought to misstate her date of birth from the moment of her arrival in Germany, and managed to lop off a few more years from her IRO documents.

  Olga and Mischka, particularly Mischka, belonged to the relatively small number of DPs capable of supporting themselves, currently and in the future; for them, remaining to make a life in Germany, or perhaps elsewhere in Europe, was a plausible option. You might expect that they would have considered this seriously, particularly in view of their linguistic skills, Mischka’s marriage to a German girl and Olga’s unwillingness to accept the separation from her sons in Riga as final. Yet there is no sign that either of them did so.