Mischka's War

On a winter's day in 1943, 22-year-old Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight as he skied through Latvian woods-a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. The world was full of such atrocities, which makes Mischka’s decision to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS by going on a student exchange to Germany all the more remarkable. Even more so when Mischka later discovered he was part-Jewish.

But his was no ordinary life. He narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire bombing of Dresden.

He then lived the precarious life of a Displaced Person in occupied Germany before heading north with the hope of crossing the border into Denmark, where he finally reunited with his mother Olga. He went on to become a member of the exceptional Heidelberg school of physics. They were both resettled in the US at the beginning of the 1950's, which is where, much later, he met, fell in love with and married Sheila Fitzpatrick.

Fitzpatrick pieces together her late husband's story through diaries, correspondence and recollections: 'This is a historian's book but it's also a wife's book about her husband ... an offering of love that is also a search for knowledge.'

About the Author

Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (2005) and Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics (edited with Stuart Macintyre, 2007).

Dr Carolyn Rasmussen is a public historian and Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her published work ranges across the history of Victorian public institutions, the history of science and technology, labour history, education history, the involvement of women therein, and biography.