Mischka’s War

AUTHOR: Sheila Fitzpatrick PUBLISHER: Melbourne University Press RRP: $34.99

REVIEWER: Mary Ann Elliott

DISTINGUISHED historian Sheila Fitzpatrick is Professor of History at the Universities of Sydney and Chicago. Specialising in Soviet history, this is the third in her series of personal memoirs.

However it is as much a history of life in Europe in the 1940s as it is an intimate biography of her late husband, physicist Michael (Mischka) Danos.

After his death in 1999 Fitzpatrick adroitly pieced together Mischka’s trajectory through dark times through recently discovered diaries, correspondence, from others who knew him and of course his own recollections.

She had met and married Mischka in the 1990s, hardly guessing at his earlier existence and the extent of his ordeals in the Second World War.

As a Hungarian Jew in Latvia, he had barely escaped with his life, but through luck and planning, had volunteered for academic study in Germany, thus ironically, avoiding conscription by the Nazis.

He narrowly avoided the fire-bombing of Dresden and survived displaced persons’ camps after the war. Mischka and his mother Olga eventually found refuge in America; their mother-son relationship plays a very large part in Fitzpatrick’s story.

It is an affectionate tribute and absorbing psychological study of a fine but complex man as well as a gripping saga of wartime and its aftermath.