A true story of a family that is divided by the events that follow the ending of a horrific Second World War and of a courageous young woman who is forcibly separated from her husband takes her four children on her own halfway across the world from to Europe and from Arabia to Turkey as a penniless refugee. The heroine has escaped from a Russia that is in the throes of a Soviet upheaval to live in Manchuria and then finds a haven in the peaceful prewar Japan. But when the clouds of war once again envelop the land, she is forced to live in Shanghai through the Second World War. As another Communist takeover erupts during the heady post war years in China, all Europeans living in Shanghai hastily leave China as refugees. She joins in the mass migration and on her own, embarks with her children on a lonely odyssey that lasts for a full six years. The story is one of human strength and the will to survive despite impossible odds.