Biography Before Emigrating To The UK
Olga Nikolaevna Uvarov was born in Moscow on 9 July 1910, the daughter of a prosperous lawyer. Their mother died and their father was executed by a revolutionary tribunal. Orphaned, she and her brothers lived together in one room, foraging for food and witnessing horrors they would never forget. But they had an uncle in London, the entomologist Boris Uvarov (later Sir Boris Uvarov, KCMG), who had heard the children were still alive.
The American Red Cross located the children for him, but such was the cost of getting people out of Russia at that time that he could afford only to pay the costs for one child. After much heart-searching, he selected Olga; she was escorted to Estonia and put on a ship for England. Boris Uvarov was horrified by the state of his waif-like niece when she arrived in England; she was without hair or fingernails, and suffering from malaria.
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)