{"product_id":"mischka-s-war-book-sheila-fitzpatrick-9781350239180","title":"Mischka's War","description":"On a winter's day in 1943, 21-year-old Latvian Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight - a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. In order to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS - the authors of such atrocities - Mischka volunteered to go on a student exchange to Germany. He did not then know that he was part Jewish. Whilst in Germany, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Surviving Hitler's Reich, he became a displaced person in occupied Germany, where in 1951 he earned a PhD at the exceptional Heidelberg Physics Institute. In the 1950s Mischka was sponsored as an immigrant to the US by a Jewish survivor whom his mother, Olga, had saved during Riga's worst period of Jewish arrests. As refugee experiences go, Mischka was among the lucky ones - but even luck leaves scars. The author Sheila Fitzpatrick, who met and married Mischka forty years after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey and survival.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52150383804689,"sku":"NLS9781350239180","price":52.89,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781350239180.jpg?v=1757609936","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/mischka-s-war-book-sheila-fitzpatrick-9781350239180","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}