Olga's Story

OLGA YUNTER was born in the summer of 1900 in a remote trading post surrounded by the desolate steppe of southern Siberia. Her childhood, as the youngest of five children, was happy, but soon mutterings of rebellion were heard in the streets and Olga, still only a schoolgirl, was swept up in the chaos of the Russian Revolution, as she helped her brothers in their desperate fight to save the town first from the Bolsheviks, and then from the brutal commander of the region's White forces. Violent tragedy ensued and, with a price on her head, Olga was forced to flee for her life. At the age of nineteen, alone and with only a handful of rubies sewn into her petticoats, she escaped, first to Vladivostok and then to northern China. She never saw her family in Siberia again. For a penniless Russian girl, China was a difficult place to suffer exile, but Olga survived: she married an Englishman and together they began to bring up their daughter in the bustling northern city of Tientsin. But in 1937 the Japanese attacked and for the second time in her life Olga lost her family home. From the comfort of her family to the terror of revolution, and dangerous journeys in exile, Olga's Story is an epic tale: the dramatic and poignant story of an ordinary woman of extraordinary resilience caught up in some of the most devastating events of the last century.