The Anti-Death League
This is a farcical creation of Kingsley Amis in his 1966 novel of the same name, set in an army camp somewhere in England. All who are against death are invited to join the league, which, however, appears to be non-existent.
Memoir of Australian childhood
This is Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010).
‘Writing not just to record but also to communicate’
Misha wrote several musings about how to read his musings. He copied letters he wrote that he considered particularly important into his diary. And in the longest of all his diary entries, on the Dresden bombing of February 1945, he breaks off the narrative in the middle to talk about the problems of getting one’s point across to a listener. Thanks to my German translator, Diana Weekes, for pointing this out, and to Mark McKenna for asking the question.
My principal sources on the Danos family background are my interviews with Jan Danos and Arpad Danos, Kata Bohus’s research, the musing ‘Stories from my Grandfather’s Times’, some fragments in Olga’s papers, Arpad’s school records, and letters from Arpad Danos and Ivan Danos on the Deutsch/Danos family in Hungary (details in Sources).
End of serfdom
Misha’s musing implies that his serf ancestors were emancipated in 1861, which is the date for the Russian Empire in general. But in most of Latvia, serfs were emancipated forty years earlier, following a model of Prussian reform. Misha’s dating may be simply a mistake, but it could be that Julia’s forebears came from a part of Latvia where emancipation came late.
Historical background and population statistics on Latvia
These are largely drawn from Daina Bleiere et al., History of Latvia: The Twentieth Century (Riga: Jumava, 2006). Quotation on Riga’s transformation is on p. 53.
Deutsch/Danos name change
At least one other probably Jewish family in Budapest changed its name from Deutsch to Danos at the turn of the century (email correspondence with Jonathan Danos circa 2007), and several Hungarian Danoses are Jewish and have left Holocaust memoirs. According to Kata Bohus, it was more common for Jews than for Germans in Hungary to obey the edict on name change.
Disappearance of Olga’s father
Misha’s version says he was never heard from again. In an undated autobiographical fragment written in English (3/29), Olga writes in the context of the First World War that ‘my father was killed’, but given the fallibility of her English, she may just have meant he was dead. In any case, it suggests that the family had some news of his fate.
Olga’s first marriage
Olga appears to have told the children when they were young that it was an engagement, not a marriage. But Jan says that when he and Arpad Jr left Riga for Kurland in 1944, hoping to escape from the imminent Soviet reoccupation, Olga told them, in case they never met again, that it was a marriage. (Misha, being already outside Latvia, evidently missed this correction.)
Arpad’s singing voice
His sons identified him as a tenor, although a review in Riga’s Russian newspaper Segodnia (16 May 1920) describes him as ‘a lyrical voice of soft timbre, even one might say of baritone colouration’. Thanks to Livija Baumane-Andrejevska of Riga for sending me this review.
Principal sources for this chapter are Olga’s and Misha’s diaries, interviews with Jan and Arpad Danos, and (on Olga’s fashion atelelier) Līvija Baumane’s essay.
Separation of parents
Jan Danos dates this to the mid 1930s, which is also what Misha told me and Helga remembers him telling her. However, Olga’s diary for 2 March 1944 unambiguously states that ‘On 13 June 1943 I left my husband. I live alone in my workshop.’
Lovers
The mention of the lover is in her diary entry of 2 April 1948, on her husband’s death. There are also references in 1940s entries to her husband’s jealousy, and a postwar letter from Paul Seeliger, a German official in wartime Riga well known to the Danoses, suggests that an intimate relationship had existed between them at some point.
‘Home to the Reich’
About fifty-one thousand Germans left in the first wave in 1939, leaving about ten thousand Germans in Latvia, most of whom left early in 1940 after the country’s annexation by the Soviet Union. History of Latvia, p. 218.
‘Cannon fodder for Adolf’
This is Jan Danos’s quotation of his father, in an interview with me on 8 September 2006.
Principal sources for this chapter are the musings ‘Plebiscite to Join the Union’, ‘VEF’ and ‘Mass Deportations in ‘41’, as well as those on socialism and the Soviet Union; Misha’s diaries; interviews with Helen Machen; and Līvija Baumane’s essay.
June 1941 deportations
See Björn M. Felder, Lettland im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), pp. 153–61. The report dated 17 May 1941 that apparently anticipates the event is published in Russian as ‘Spetssoobshchenie V.N. Merkulov I. V. Stalinu ob itogakh operatsii po arestu i vyseleniiu “antisovetskikh elementov” iz pribaltiiskikh respublik 17 maia 1941 g.’, in Lubianka: Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR ‘Smersh’ 1939-mart 1946 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 2006), pp. 279–81.
Russia replaces Germany as Latvia’s ‘primary enemy’
The quotation is from History of Latvia, p. 260.
Ariadna’s deportation
Misha remembered Ufa as the destination, but an article on Ariadna’s father, Professor Paul Sakss, says it was Vorkuta (Valdemārs Karkliņš, ‘Brīnišķīgs ceļojums’, Latviu mūsika I Latvian Music, no. 18, 1988, p. 1905). Thanks to Dailonis Stauvers for supplying me with a copy.
Soviet everyday
The book referred to is Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
The chapter draws on my interview with Bičevskis’; the musings on ‘Nazi Latvia’, ‘Saving Jews’, ‘Mass Graves’ and ‘Koelln and Seeliger’; and Mischka’s ‘Rittergut’ document. On Olga’s and Mary’s saving of Jews, additional sources are emails from Barry Mirkin and Margers Vestermanis; the Spokane Daily Chronicle report on Mirkin and Olga (1 November 1950); and Olga’s interview with the Miami Herald (27 June 1954).
German attack on Riga, 1941
A four-pronged assault on Latvia, including one direction towards Riga, was part of the initial German assault on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941. By 8 July, the German Army had occupied the entire territory of Latvia. History of Latvia, pp. 263–4.
Ice hockey
According to Latvian sports historian Andris Zeļenkovs, Misha played in the LSB-2 and US-2 teams in 1939–40, the latter being the university’s second team.
German policy towards Latvia
From July 1941, Latvia was ruled by the Reich through Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium die besetzten Ostgebiete), but its administration, based in Riga, was Latvian under German supervision. There was even talk about future extension of Latvian autonomy, especially in cultural matters. History of Latvia, pp. 267–8, 272–3.
Riga ghetto
The move of Riga’s Jews to the Riga ghetto was completed on 25 October 1941. Jews were being exterminated in Latvia’s smaller towns throughout the autumn, but it was late in November that the mass killing of Jews from the Riga ghetto began. By mid December, about twenty-five thousand Riga Jews had been killed and buried in pits in the Rumbula Forest, leaving about six thousand Jews alive in Latvia. Trainloads of Jews from Germany and Austria were then brought in and accommodated in the Riga ghetto, most of them to be killed in their turn. History of Latvia, pp. 278, 282–4. For a more detailed account, see Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia 1941–1944 (Washington, DC: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996).
Saving Jews
Latvian historian Margers Vestermanis has compiled a list of 420 Latvians who saved Jews: Vestermanis, Juden in Riga (1995) and email of 16 August 2015. This is an ongoing project, and we have been in communication about adding Mary Sakss and Olga Danos to the list. The date of Mary’s arrest—21 October 2015—was kindly supplied by Dr Vestermanis.
For accounts of how individual Jews from the ghetto were saved by being assigned to work for Latvian businesses in the city (usually tailoring shops, like Olga’s) and staying overnight on the premises when execution round-ups were imminent, as well as ‘vanishing’ from the convoy taking them from the ghetto to work in the city and back, see Bernard Press, The Murder of the Jews in Latvia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), and the testimony of David Silberman and Lev Aronov in Gertrude Schneider (ed.), Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember (New York: Philosophical Library, 1987).
Olga’s relations with Seeliger
See ‘Lovers’ in the notes to chapter 2, above.
Baltic-German wartime university exchange
Detailed information is in Margot Blank, Nationalsozialistische Hochschulpolitik in Riga (1941 bis 1944): Konzeption und Realität eines Bereiches deutscher Besatzungspolitik (Lüneberg: Verlag Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1991), pp. 64–73.
The principal sources for this chapter are correspondence between Misha in Germany and Olga in Riga; Olga’s diary; the letter to Olga from ‘Der Alte’; the musings ‘Medical Experimentations’ and ‘Cleansing of Concepts: Informers vs denouncers in Nazi, Soviet, DDR’; interviews with Jan Danos, Arpad Danos, Helen Machen and Mrs Wally Ayers; and letters to Mischka from Waldtraut Herrnberger, including her ‘Verpflichtung’.
Dick Whittington
Misha’s oral account of his travels had a folkloric ring. I don’t remember if he knew or invoked the English Dick Whittington story, but a possible German parallel is the youth sent off into the wide world by his miller father in Joseph von Eichendroff’s early nineteenth-century Aus der Leben eines Taugenichts. Thanks to Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus for alerting me to this source.
Dr Hans Boening
A card in Olga’s papers identifies him, as of late 1944, as President Dr Boening, Reich Inspector of Labour Draft Plenipotentiaries (Reichsinspecteur des Generalvollmächtigen für den Arbeitseinsatz) with a Reichenburg address. A note on the back, dated 1 December 1944, reads ‘A request to Hr Dir. Wesseloky, AEG-Godenbach, to be willing to receive and advise Frau O. Danos’. After the war, Boening kept in contact with Olga—her papers contain a card from him with an Oldenburg address (Federal Republic of Germany) sent to her in New York in 1953.
Dresden Technical University
It is remarkable that Mischka’s studies at the TH were so comparatively normal, given that the university was only semi-functional, with some departments completely closed in connection with manpower call-ups. See Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942–1945, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. 355-6 (entry for 10 September 1944). Klemperer, a former professor of the Dresden TH, had been dismissed as a Jew.
Mauserl
The reference is to a German fairy story, ‘Hauserl und Mauserl’, that Olga must have read her children. It is set in Vienna.
Divorce
The visit to the lawyer is described in her diary for 2 May 1944. She does not return to the topic in later entries.
Letter from ‘Der Alte’
Thanks to Jan Danos for identifying the handwriting and the enclosed photograph as those of his father, and for deciphering and interpreting the text.
This chapter is based on the 1996 Musing ‘Dresden’ and Mischka’s diary entries for 12–22 April 1945, written two months after the bombing. The translation of the diary is a joint effort by me and a professional translator, Diana Weekes, for whose help I am very grateful.
On Nanni and the aftermath of the bombing, I draw on the musing ‘Shell Shock: Dresden, 1944, 1945’ and Mischka’s diary.
‘Christmas trees’
This is what Germans called the flairs dropped by bombing units to light up their targets.
Vonnegut
The reference is to the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose Slaughterhouse Five (1969) describes the bombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut himself, as an American POW, experienced. I never asked Misha what he thought of Vonnegut’s novel, but Matthew Lenoe, one of my Chicago students from the 1990s, did. He says Misha replied ‘that the reality was so surreal that he didn’t think you could top it with a surreal novel about the event’ (email to author, 22 October 2016).
Principal sources are Mischka’s diary and letters to Olga; the musing ‘Occupation Forces in 1945’ (quotation on British arrogance); letters to Mischka from Nanni; interviews with Bičevskis and his ‘Bičevskis Family History’ email.
Pferdewasser school
In a pencilled latter to Olga dated 25 March 1945, Mischka referred to having ‘gone to Pferdewasser [in Flensburg, where the Timm Kroeger School was located], but it was overcrowded’, in a sentence wedged in between remarks about his suitcase and his hospital committal. But since he was taken semi-conscious from the station straight to the hospital, he couldn’t have done this, so it sounds like delirium. Probably the original plan was for Olga and Mischka to meet at the school.
Flensburg 1945
Information from Flensburg, 700 Jahre Stadt: Eine Festschrift (Flensburg: 1984) and Lange Schatten: Ende der NS-Diktatur and frühe Nachkriegsjahre (Flensburg: 2000). The latter includes concert programmes and excerpts from the Flensburger Stadt-Chronik/Flensburg News, from which I have quoted.
Eisenhower edict
General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later US president) was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.
DPs
In providing historical context on DPs, I have drawn to a large extent on my own scholarly research. The quotations on allied attitudes to DPs are from the UNRRA archives, New York, S-0425-0010-17 (‘Report on General Situation and Living Conditions of Displaced Persons and UNRRA, 1946’) and ibid., S-0402-0003-0001 (June 1945 report on ‘UNRRA and Displaced Persons’ by Harold Ingham). Good general works on the topic are Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (London: Vintage Books, 2011).
Mischka’s apologia
This is the undated (1946) ‘Rittergut’ statement [see Sources].
Reopening of German universities
Information from David Phillips, ‘The Re-opening of Universities in the British Zone: The Problem of Nationalism and Student Admissions’, in David Phillips (ed.), German Universities after the Surrender: British Occupation Policy and the Control of Higher Education (Oxford: University of Oxford Department of Educational Studies, 1983).
Zeilsheim and Frankfurt Jewish listing
The certification of Michael Danos’s residence at Zeilsheim DP camp is signed Sidney Flatow, UNRRA Team 503. The listing of Michael Danos in the Jewish community document is in his ITS (International Tracing Service) file [see Sources]. Simon Mirkin’s ITS file contains a document headed ‘Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Occupied Zone’, dated December 1946, which gives Zeilsheim as his current address.
HIAS
This is the US-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, in operation since the late nineteenth century and active after the war in helping care for and resettle Jewish DPs in Europe.
Principal sources are Olga and Mischka’s letters; Olga’s diary; Simon Mirkin’s 1946 letter to Olga; and interviews with Jan Danos and Arpad Danos.
Mary Sakss
Mary listed her profession as ‘singer’ on the DP documents in her ITS file. There are a number of photographs of her performing, sometimes in Latvian national dress, in the Danos papers (which include some of Mary’s papers, sent to Olga after her death).
British zone work requirement for DPs
The British zonal authorities announced at the end of April 1946 that work would become mandatory for DPs, and this new policy became operative in October. UNRRA, however, was unhappy about it, and its implementation seems to have been patchy at best. As of 20 June 1946, only about 30 per cent of employable DPs were in fact employed, and of those, 80 per cent were working for UNRRA; see Wolfgang Jacobmayer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum heimatlosen Auslánder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), pp. 159–61, and UNRRA’s monthly labour reports, in the UNRRA archives, S-0425-0010-13. On the difficulties of setting up small businesses without German credentials (Meisterbriefe), see Tillmann Tegeler, ‘Esten, Letten und Litauer in Nachkriegsdeutschland’, in Christian and Marianne Pletzing (eds), Displaced Persons: Flüchtlinge aus den baltischen Staaten in Deutschland (Munich: Martin Meindenbauer, 2007), p. 24.
Simon and Boris Mirkin
Information on their wartime experiences comes from Simon’s 1946 letter to Olga and their ITS files.
Princess Volkonsky’s story
The memoir, well known in its time and translated into various languages, is Princess Peter Wolkonsky [Sophia A. Volkonsky/Volkonskaia], The Way of Bitterness: Soviet Russia, 1920 (London: Methuen, 1931).
An excerpt appears in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (eds), In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Repatriant’s visit
Voluntary repatriation of ‘displaced persons’ to the Soviet Union was possible, free of cost, and strongly encouraged by the Soviets, but few took advantage of it because of dislike of the Soviet regime or fear of being arrested on return. Letters from relatives, such as Olga received from Arpad Jr, were let through by the Soviets in order to encourage repatriation.
The principal sources for this chapter are my interviews with Bičevskis and Stauvers; Mischka’s diary; and correspondence between Mischka and Olga, and between Mischka and Nanni.
Hanover after the war
I have drawn on Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Perry Biddiscombe, The Denazification of Germany: A History 1945–1950 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2007); and Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985). The quotations are from British war correspondent Leonard Mosley, in Botting, p. 22, and from Botting, p. 164.
DP student life
Bella Brodzki and Jeremy Varon, ‘The Munich Years: The Students of Post-war Germany’, in Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution: Proceedings of the International Conference, London, 29–31 January 2003 (Osnabrück: Secolo-Verlag, 2005), p. 156.
Latvians in German universities
Information, statistics and student names are from the ‘Latvian students in universities in British Zone’ section in the ‘Report on German Universities, March 1946’, UNRRA archives, S-0408-0033-06; the Stauvers interview; and Juris Andrejs Zusevics (ed.), Zelta Lapas Gaisma: Latviesu Student Eiropas augstskolas pec otra pasaules kara (Holland, MI: Amerikas Latviesu Apvienibas Latviesu Instituts, 1990).
Theoretical positions at Hanover TH filled by experimentalists
Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 172.
Michael Danos as physicist
See the recollections of Walter Greiner, Jan Rafelski, Max Huber, Vincent Gillet and Evans Hayward in Walter Greiner (ed.), Proceedings of the Symposium on Fundamental Issues in Elementary Matter, 25–29 September 2000, Bad Honnef, Germany: In Honor and Memory of Michael Danos (Debrecen: EP Systema, 2001), pp. 415–30.
Soviet zone of Germany
On the situation in universities, see Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, p. 329 and Biddiscombe, Denazification, p. 137; on travel in and out of the zone, see J.P. Nettl, The Eastern Zone and Soviet Policy in Germany 1945–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 260–3.
Mischka as pole vaulter
Mischka vaulted a personal best of 3.7 metres at the British zonal championships in 1946. He was aiming at 4 metres, if he could only get a decent pole, at a time when 4.5 metres was the world record. (Now, with fibreglass poles, it is over 6 metres.)
Job with Jensen
Mischka was working as Jensen’s assistant since at least June 1948. His original title was Leiter, with a salary of DM 80 a month. When Steinwedel, Jensen’s former assistant, left for Heidelberg, Mischka took over as Jensen’s official Wissenschaftlicher Assistent.
Principal sources are correspondence between Mischka and Olga; the musing ‘Quasi-kruzhki Elsewhere’ on the Heidelberg Tea Colloquium; Berthold Stech’s memoir ‘J.H.D. Jensen: Personal Recollection’; interviews with Helga Danos; and letters to Mischka from Nanni Schuster.
Jensen
J.H.D. (Hans) Jensen (1907–1973) received his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1932 and then worked there as a lecturer (Privatdocent). An older colleague at Hamburg, the chemist Paul Harteck, brought him into the wartime Uranium Club, and they wrote some important papers together on separation of uranium isotopes. In 1933, he joined the National Socialist German University Lecturers’ League, which at Hamburg was more or less obligatory if you wanted to be habilitiert (that is, receive the second doctorate), and became a candidate member of the Nazi Party in 1936, the year of his Habilitation, and a full member in 1937. His postwar Persilschein from Heisenberg argued that he had joined these organisations only in order to avoid unnecessary difficulties in his academic career. After the war, he was professor of theoretical physics at Hanover TH, and then became an ordinarius professor (at the top of the academic ladder) at the University of Heidelberg in 1949, which remained his base for the rest of his career. In the 1950s and 1960s, he held visiting professorships at a number of universities in the United States. In 1963, he won the Nobel Prize for physics (with Maria Goeppert-Meyer) for their work on the nuclear shell model.
Development of physics in Germany
I have drawn particularly on Klaus Hentschel (ed.), Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1996), including biographies of Jensen, Bothe et al.; Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); and Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1960). On physics at the University of Heidelberg, my main source was Charlotte Schönbeck, ‘Physik’, in Wolfgang U. Eckart, Volker Sellin and Eike Wolgast (eds), Die Universität Heidelberg im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer Medizin Verlag, 2006), pp. 1087–149.
Nobel laureates
Listed at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country #Germany, accessed 27 August 2016. Rudolf Mössbauer was a student of the Heidelberg experimentalist and Tea Colloquium participant Heinz Maier-Leibniz, who Misha thought should have shared Mossbauer’s 1961 Nobel Prize (‘Quasi-Kruzhki’ musing).
This chapter draws largely on the correspondence between Mischka and Olga.
Olga’s changing birthdate
Misha gave Olga’s birth date as 1897 in ‘Stories from my Grandfather’s Time’. According to her AEF DP registration, dated 15 January 1946, she was born on 2 November 1899. Another record in the same ITS file, dated 26 July 1948, gives the date as 2 October 1905.
Authoritarian personality theory
On its application by US agencies in Germany, see David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 65–6. Misha’s version is in his musing ‘Psycho-sociology in Germany’.
DP departures
See notes for chapter 12, below.
Daniel Kolz
In addition to Helga Danos’s testimony, there is also a fragment in German in Olga’s papers (3/23) suggesting a romantic dimension to the relationship.
Music in postwar Germany
I have drawn on Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007); Monod, Settling Scores (‘beasts of war’ quotation, p. 39); and Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Harper, 2009), pp. 373–85.
The principal sources for this chapter are the correspondence between Mischka and Helga in Heidelberg and Olga in New York; interviews with Helga Danos; and Helga’s long letter to her parents about their trip.
Haxel
Otto Haxel (1909–1998) came to Heidelberg from Göttingen, where he had worked under Heisenberg and collaborated with Fritz Houtermans (which perhaps explains why Mischka had so many Houtermans stories). At the time of his move to Heidelberg, he and Jensen were collaborating on work on the nuclear shell model (‘magic numbers’), which in turn was related to Mischka’s dissertation topic and first publication.
Michael Danos: work and publications in Heidelberg
In an application for federal employment in the mid 1950s, Misha described his work for Jensen as ‘theoretical research in nuclear physics, particularly interaction of electromagnetic radiation with atomic nuclei. Includes: quantum theory, electrodynamics, hydrodynamics’. In his subsequent position with Haxel, he did ‘experimental work on the physics of surfaces, particularly metal surfaces. Includes: work with Geiger counters, electronics, ultra violet radiation, x-rays’. His publications in these years were:
Helmut Steinwedel and Michael Danos, ‘Proton Density Variation in Nuclei’, Physical Review, vol. 79, no. 6, 1951, pp. 1019–20. This letter was published immediately after a letter by Helmut Steinwedel, J. Hans D. Jensen and Peter Jensen, entitled ‘Nuclear Dipole Vibrations’, in the same issue.
Michael Danos, ‘Has Pressure Direction?’, American Journal of Physics, vol. 19, no. 4, April 1951, p. 248. This was the journal Mischka identified as low-status; he later left the article out of his CVs.
Michael Danos and Helmut Steinwedel, ‘Multiple Oscillations of Protons v. Neutrons in Atomic Nuclei’, Zeitschrift für Naturforschung 6A, 1951, p. 217.
M. Danos, ‘Resonances in (y, n) Processes’, in Zeitschrift fur Naturforschung 6A, 1951, p. 218.
An additional article by Michael Danos and Helmut Steinwedel was reported in their Physical Review letter to be forthcoming in Sitzungsberichten den Heidelberger Akademie, Wiss. Math.natur Klass but does not appear in any of his CVs.
Mary Sakss
The story of her denunciation and failure to get a US visa is in the musing ‘Donosi v. Informers’. Her ITS file confirms her plans to emigrate to the United States but does not indicate an outcome. With regard to age, she was Olga’s older sister by several years, but the 1945 DP registration in her ITS file gives her date of birth as 1898. A later German ID in the same file gives it as 1908.
US immigration and anti-Communism
My sources on this debate are Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924–1952 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957); Carl J. Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Gil Loescher and John A. Scanlan, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1986); and Haim Genizi, America’s Fair Share: The Admission and Resettlement of Displaced Persons, 1945–1952 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1993).
DP departures
The great majority of DPs had left by the time Mischka and Helga did—almost a million, which is about the number of DPs that were initially on UNRRA’s books. More than three hundred thousand of the group had gone to the United States, but both US and overall numbers were dropping sharply in 1950–51. Statistics are from Kim Salomon, Refugees in the Cold War (Lund: Lund University Press, 1991), p. 191. The quotation on ‘the final rush’ is from Wyman, DPs, p. 202.
USS General Ballou
Information on sailing is from the IRO records in Archives nationales (Paris), AJ/43/271.
Misha’s New York employment
The Columbia starting date could have been backdated, in which case the period of his unemployment could have lasted until the autumn of 1952, as Helga’s account suggests. There is a fuzziness in the documents that suggests something is being glossed over: for example, Misha’s application for naturalisation in the mid 1950s appears to conflate his employment history after arrival with Helga’s.
Tadasu Okada (also known as James T. Okada)
According to Okada’s petition for naturalisation, lodged in New York in 1950, he was born in Numaza, Japan, on 17 November 1884 (www.fold3.com/document/22454494/, accessed 12 August 2016). The US Social Security Death index gives his birthdate as 18 November 1894 and the date of his death in Miami, Florida, as June 1987 (www.myheritage.com, accessed 12 August 2016).
Olga’s marriage to Tadasu Okada
A diary entry for 9 March 1955 says she has been Olga Okada for seven months. A letter from Okada to Misha (‘Michika’), 1 October 1954, states that he is now a ‘legal husband’.
Miami Herald article
Although there is no byline, the author was probably Jack Bell, nicknamed ‘the Miami Herald towncrier’ in one of Olga’s several diary entries about him (‘towncrier’ is in English).
Olga’s land
Tadasu Okada continued to live on the property after Olga’s death, according to Helga’s recollection. There is no will in her papers, and it appears that no attempt was made to distribute it to her sons. Arpad did write to Tadasu after her death enquiring about her estate (Nachlass— not specifically land), but Tadasu’s answer is unknown.
Misha’s German and French collaborations in the US years
Walter Greiner, ‘Michael Danos as I Remember Him’; Max G. Huber, ‘Trespassing Frontiers—the Legacy of Michael Danos’; and Vincent Gillet, ‘In Memory of Michael Danos’, in Greiner (ed.), Proceedings of the Symposium on Fundamental Issues in Elementary Matter, pp. 415–16, 420–3 and 423–4.
‘Case studies’ article
The article using the experiences of Mischka, Olga and Bičevskis is Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘“Determined to Get on”: Some Displaced Persons on the Way to a Future’, History Australia, vol. 12, no. 2, 2015, pp. 102–23.
Victor Klemperer gives one in his memoir I Will Bear Witness. Many more have been collected in Walter Kempowski, Der Rote Hahn: Dresden im February 1945 (Munich: Knaus, 2001), one of the volumes in his monumental ‘collective diary’ of German experience in the Second World War, Das Echolot (‘Echo Soundings’).