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, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka''s odyssey and survival.>

Product details

• Authors: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Fitzpatrick Sheila, Fitzpatrick Sheila Fitzpatrick
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.02.2021
• EAN: 9781350239180
• ISBN: 978-1-350-23918-0
• No. of pages: 256
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Biographies, autobiographies; HISTORY / Europe / Germany, Europe, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical, Spain, Germany, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, Memoirs, Jewish Studies, Fascism & Nazism, Second World War, The Holocaust, Latvia, United States of America, USA, c 1930 to c 1939, Far-right political ideologies and movements, Modern warfare, c 1940 to c 1949, Specific wars and campaigns, Relating to Jewish people and groups, Refugees and political asylum, Refugees & Political Asylum, Civil wars, Social groups: religious groups and communities, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / General, HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / General, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Holocaust