Michael and Olga Danos, 1940s.
THIS mother-and-son photo from the Danos family collection is undated, but Misha, born in Riga, Latvia, in 1922, looks to be in his early twenties, which puts Olga in her mid forties. The photo could have been taken any time during the war or even after it, but not later than 1949. That was the year that Misha, having become Mischka in his new German context, married the young German Helga Heimers. Unlike the slapdash Olga, or Mischka-the-budding-physicist with his mind on higher things, Helga was an orderly person who labelled and dated family photographs.
If the photo was taken in 1940, that was the year Misha had just finished school and started his first job at Riga’s State Electrotechnical Factory, (VEF). Olga at that point was separated from his father and living in the workshop of her fashion atelier, but the sons remained in close contact and often dropped round for tea (the object bottom right in the photo seems to be a teapot; the things or person obscuring Misha’s right shoulder are unidentified). Or it could have been taken in the autumn of 1941, when Misha entered the University of Riga as an engineering student. In this short period, Latvia had changed its status more than once, successively falling under Soviet occupation, ceasing to be an independent state and becoming a constituent part of the Soviet Union, and then being occupied by the Germans. Misha, of call-up age under all three regimes, had managed to avoid conscription into any of these armies, which was a good thing as the Danoses—despite their competence in all three languages—had no enthusiasm for any of the regimes.
There were lots of leave-takings and reunions in 1944–45, any one of which could have been the occasion for the photo. In the spring of 1944, to escape the conscription into the German forces that now seemed inevitable, Misha went off to study in Germany, a scheme probably hatched by Olga. In the following months, as Soviet forces advanced and it became clear that they were about to reoccupy Latvia, Olga started planning her own departure and that of the other two sons. The photo could have been taken in Riga in the summer, when Mischka made a brief farewell visit from Germany, or a few months later in Dresden or the Sudetenland, where he and Olga met up again after she moved her tailoring business to the region. By this time, it was clear that they were the only two family members who had got out: an attempt by the other two sons to leave Latvia by sea, organised by Olga, had failed, and as Latvia had been incorporated into the Soviet Union, they were now willy-nilly Soviet citizens living behind a closed border.
Or it could conceivably have been taken in Flensburg, in the north of Germany, close to the Danish border, where Mischka and Olga met up in the spring of 1945 after making their separate ways across Germany in the months before its final capitulation and, in Mischka’s case, surviving both the Allied bombing of Dresden and a bout of diphtheria en route. I doubt this, however: Olga looks too spruce for a refugee and Mischka too healthy for someone still recovering from a serious illness. It was in Flensburg that the two of them officially became DPs, under the care of UNRRA (the United National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the British occupation forces.
What the picture captures beautifully, whenever it was taken, is the relationship between the two. Olga leans towards him, straightforwardly warm and affectionate and engaged, and Mischka accepts her affection, even returns it, but preserves his independence by looking slightly away. This is exactly how they were in the letters they exchanged regularly over the years of their residence in Germany, 1944–51. Fortunately for us, they were generally not living in the same city. For much of 1944, the correspondence was between Mischka in Dresden and Olga in Riga and then various towns in the Sudetenland. Then, after some months together in Flensburg, Mischka moved to Hanover to study at the technical university there. Olga, by now developing a career as a sculptor as well as running a tailoring business, moved to Fulda in the American zone in 1947. She was still there two years later when Mischka went to Heidelberg, also in the American zone, to do his PhD in physics, marrying Helga, whom he had met in the Hanover sports club shortly before the move. The correspondence turns international at the end of 1950, when Olga emigrated to the United States, sponsored by one of the Jews she had protected back in Riga during the German occupation. It ends when Mischka and Helga arrived in New York as immigrants a year later and were reunited with Olga.
All this time, Olga was writing warm, chatty, practical, informative letters about what she was doing, in her rather untidy handwriting and with quite a few mistakes in the German, while Mischka responded in better German and more legible handwriting, giving Olga his thoughts on physics, philosophy and (when he was having girlfriend trouble) relations between the sexes, but rarely condescending, despite her repeated requests, to give her the mundane details about his everyday and student life that she, sometimes with a certain asperity, requested. That parsimoniousness with information, along with a teasing tendency to obfuscation (‘Which Baltic state?’ ‘The middle one’) was as recognisable to me as his handwriting, which hadn’t changed in forty years.
When the correspondence starts, Olga writes as a parent— caring but also authoritative, generous with advice and sometimes admonition. As it develops, she yields some authority to Mischka and even starts to defer to him on business and organisational questions. This undoubtedly reflects the fact that he was growing up, but also suggests that the canny Olga was encouraging him to do so, even tutoring him in the new role. The depth of Olga’s affection is evident in her letters; the depth of Mischka’s perhaps only from his diary. But as Olga once wrote to him, it didn’t matter whether he expressed his affection openly or not because she could always decode him. For the six or seven years they were in Germany, each was for the other the closest and most important person in the world. That’s why a book that was meant to be just about Mischka ended up as a book about Mischka and Olga.