Mischka's War by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)

Author:Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2017-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

I didn’t shower you with tenderness, but treated you in a comradely fashion. I never kissed any of you on the mouth, always only on the eyes. When you were still little, you were for me, I could almost say, even if it’s not quite right … sacred, [meaning] that one instinctively feared to profane. Later I intentionally did nothing, I was afraid of awakening your sensuality as young boys too soon.

Whether Olga had succeeded in her aim of discouraging her sons from falling in love with her is open to debate. She may have been more successful in bringing them up to be proud, with a strong sense of their own dignity: ‘I never asked you [her sons] to beg pardon—politely saying sorry is something else. It could make me really angry if Iantschi [Jan] did this on his own initiative, and [I] forbade him to do it.’ Mischka didn’t need instruction on these lines. Olga might tease him in her letters about being a bad correspondent (‘Write soon, dear lazybones!’), but he never started his replies with the conventional apology. I was interested to learn of Olga’s part in developing a trait in Misha that was very familiar to me, but hitherto a bit puzzling. Misha was generally an easygoing man, but he never apologised for anything, large or small. The reflex ‘Oh, sorry’ that punctuates most people’s everyday interactions was quite absent from his. If he saw that he had done something that annoyed me, he would, without comment, simply avoid repeating it.

At this period, Olga was undoubtedly the most important person in Mischka’s life, and he in Olga’s. That, of course, didn’t mean that they lacked separate private lives. Mischka often wrote to Olga about his; she sometimes wrote (but more briefly and in less confessional vein) to Mischka about hers. When describing business relations with men, she might indicate that business did not exclude flirtation, on one or both sides. She would occasionally give an ironic report of a suitor, like the Englishman (probably an officer with the military government or UNRRA staffer) whose love letters kept comparing her to other women, always with the conclusion ‘You are so different, so different’ (Olga quoted this phrase in English).

When Olga’s two German admirers from Riga, Herren von Koelln and Seeliger, showed up again in Germany, Olga passed on the information to Mischka. Von Koelln (or Koellner) was in Wiesbaden and had got a job as a hotel porter. Paul Seeliger, the former commandant, had resurfaced in Flensburg, making contact not only with Olga but also with Mirkin, his former charge in the ghetto. Mischka met Seeliger too, and later told me that the former camp commandant had then

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