Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York

ISBN-13: 9781788310222 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 336 str.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Opis

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. There, as the war drew to an end, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. 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. 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. Sponsored as immigrants by one of the Jews Olga had saved, they eventually reached New York in the early 1950s. As refugee experiences go, they were among the lucky ones--but even luck leaves scars. The author, who met and married Mischka forty years after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling this remarkable story.

Recenzje

Beautifully written and deeply felt, the book is much more than a labor of love. It is a recreation of two significant lives, Misha's and his mother, Olga's, that together illustrate, indeed illuminate, a time and place in the turbulent twentieth century. Journal of Modern History

Spis treści

IntroductionMischka and Olga1 Family2 Childhood3 Riga under the Soviets4 Riga under the Germans5 Wartime Germany6 The Bombing of Dresden7 Displaced Persons in Flensburg8 Olga, from Flensburg to Fulda9 Student in Hanover10 Physics and Marriage in Heidelberg11 Olga's Departure12 Mischka's DepartureAfterwordNotesSourcesAcknowledgementsIndex

O autorze

Sheila Fitzpatrick is Emerita Professor of History at the University of Chicago, USA and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. One of the most acclaimed historians of 20th-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).