Mischka's War

On a winter's day in 1943, 21-year-old Latvian Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight - a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. In order to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS - the authors of such atrocities - Mischka volunteered to go on a student exchange to Germany. He did not then know that he was part Jewish. Whilst in Germany, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Surviving Hitler's Reich, he became a displaced person in occupied Germany, where in 1951 he earned a PhD at the exceptional Heidelberg Physics Institute. In the 1950s Mischka was sponsored as an immigrant to the US by a Jewish survivor whom his mother, Olga, had saved during Riga's worst period of Jewish arrests. As refugee experiences go, Mischka was among the lucky ones - but even luck leaves scars. The author Sheila Fitzpatrick, who met and married Mischka forty years after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey and survival.

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).