Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York, Fitzpatrick - C

                                                       The author is a noted historian of the Soviet Union, and this is a book written about her husband, a theoretical physicist, whom she married in 1989. Mischka Danos was born in Latvia in 1922. Six years after his 1999 death, Fitzpatrick opened a box that held her husband's diary, as well as his mother Olga's, from before WW2 and up to the early 1950's. She decided to write this history.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Mischka was the second of three children born in a Riga that had suffered throughout the first War and the ensuing Revolution. His family struggled financially until his mother opened a dress shop.  Mischka attended the University of Riga as an engineering student in 1941, and somehow avoided both Soviet and German conscription. He was employed at the State Electrotechnical Factory, a critical provider of radios and electrical equipment to the Soviets, and, after Barbarossa, the Germans. Olga used her shop to employ and hide Jews from the Nazis. In 1944, when the Soviets were re-taking the Baltics, Mischka, fearful of being drafted by the Germans, transferred to a university in Dresden. Olga utilized her contacts in the German military and also fled Riga. Her husband and two other sons remained in what again became the Soviet Union. Mischka survived the bombing of Dresden and headed to a town near the Danish border. He and Olga had concluded their best bet was to get as close to the western Allies as soon as possible.
                                                        The end of the war saw both Olga and Mischka in Flensburg as displaced persons (DPs). Because the UK and the US did not recognize the Soviet occupation of Latvia, they were not subject to forcible return. Mischka enrolled in Hanover Technical University in January, 1946. He graduated in 1946 and went to Heidelberg to study for his doctorate under his mentor, who was offered a full professorship. In 1949, he married Helga Heimars. The focus of those in charge of the DPs turned from repatriation to emigration from Europe. Argentina, Australia, Canada and the US were the preferred options. Sponsored by a Jewish family she had helped in Riga, Olga left for New York in 1950. A year later, Mischka and Helga followed. He did some postdoc studying at Columbia, before obtaining a job with the US Government, where he would work for forty-years.
                                                         Clearly, the author is devoted to her late husband. And his story is mildly interesting. But there just is not enough here to merit attention.