Escape from Tian Shan - My Story of Surviving Mao’s Great Famine

It is Christmas 1958 and I am five years old, the daughter of a retired White Russian army commander. Mao Zedong's famine is rife in China and people are starving to death. In the dead of night, with snow falling heavily around us, my family sneaks out of our hometown of Kuldja with the intention of escaping from China over the Tian Shan mountains.As we travel to the nearest railway station, hundreds of kilometres away - having bribed the driver of a Chinese communist government truck - I inform my mother that people on horseback are fast approaching and wonder why her face turns the colour of whitewash.