Closing the Circle (part 1)

Olga’s father Yevgeni was born in Harbin in 1911. Aged 18, he travelled to study medical science in Czechoslovakia and Italy, and returned to Harbin eight years later in 1937. In 1941, he married Olga’s mother Valentina, and they settled in Shenyang, then known as Mukden, some 500 kilometers to the southwest of Harbin. Shortly before Olga’s birth on July 24, 1945, her mother Valentina decided to return to Harbin to give birth there. It was a fateful decision. When the news of her husband’s arrest was made known, Valentina was not told where he had been taken. Her enquiries were met with stony indifference, and she was forced to raise her daughter as a single parent until, eight years later, on August 23, 1953, having heard nothing of his fate, not knowing if he was dead or alive, she obtained a church divorce from him in preparation for her departure from China, an eventuality that had by then become painfully necessary.  

In 1949, four years before this, China had itself become Communist. Mao Zedong, another murderous Marxist, led a triumphant army to victory over Chiang Kai-Shek, who retreated to the island of Taiwan. With ruthless revolutionary zeal, Chinese Communists sought to reclaim their land from ‘foreign capitalists’ and purge from it all adulterating influences that contaminated their brand of ideologically-based xenophobia. Thus began the great Russian and Jewish diaspora from Harbin. Many more fortunate refugees—engineers, doctors, and other professionals—left for Australia, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, some to America, and a few Russians even ‘returned’ to a sovietized Russia they would not recognize. Olga, her mother and grandmother travelled by train to Tientsin (now Tianjin), and from there by boat to Hong Kong, where Anna discovered that while she herself was eligible to apply to emigrate to the United States, as her son Yura the violinist was resident there, and she herself had been born in pre-revolutionary Russia, rigorous entry formalities would have to apply to her effectively stateless daughter and granddaughter. All three lacked Soviet passports. One country would take them, however: little landlocked Paraguay, the fiefdom of the dictator General Alfredo Stroessner, a staunch anti-Communist whose repressive military dictatorship was later discovered to have sheltered the Nazi monster Josef Mengele, who had fled there to escape retribution at Nuremberg, and whose regime later acquired, like neighbouring Argentina, a dismal reputation for its failure to protect the human rights of its own citizens.

There must have been many opportunities for soul-searching among the adults (mostly women unaccompanied by husbands, and without specialized degrees or qualifications) on the long sea voyage to Paraguay on board a Dutch steamship. It took 50 days of sea-travel, with stops in Singapore, islands in the Indian Ocean, and South African ports, before arrival in Buenos Aires. Three female refugees without papers went from voluntary exile from their spiritual homeland, Mother Russia, into a yet more distant exile on the other side of the world where they knew no-one and spoke not a word of Spanish. Yet with courage and determination, the enterprising women built a life there for themselves and little Olga, learning Spanish, finding lodging and employment and a measure of peace and security in the sleepy capital city of Asuncion, where, Olga recalls, browsing animals—donkeys, cows, oxen and goats—had the right of way over traffic on the city’s two main streets.