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.