Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York
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, turbans her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey and survival.
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Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York
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, turbans her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey and survival.
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Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York
256Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York
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42.95
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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781350239180 |
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Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
Publication date: | 02/25/2021 |
Pages: | 256 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
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