He had been a child in Stalingrad when the German Sixth Army had arrived in August of 1942. I had read about the battle, of course; it was one of the deadliest battles in the history of warfare, with millions of lives lost. Hearing his story firsthand made my experience during the war seem like a holiday in the country. The evacuations had largely spared Britain’s children the horrors of the war, but in the Soviet Union, there had been nowhere to run. Yuri had fought for his land and scraped to survive.

And now, he wanted to create a world where Stalingrad never happened again. I have never seen anyone so focused on anything. His field was virology, and he was learning from the best in the world, who apparently were on board the Beagle.

In August of 1967, we docked in Mombasa. Yuri and a team rushed to Uganda to investigate a viral outbreak. They brought samples back. Containment was instituted in the labs, and for good reason: I later learned the virus they’d brought on board was Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever close in nature to Ebola (which was discovered in Zaire about ten years later).

I found one scientist much more interesting than the others: Lin Keller. She was the child of a Chinese mother and a German father, and she had grown up in Hong Kong during the war. She described, in vivid terms, living through the fall of the island. On the same day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they also attacked the British colony of Hong Kong. Local troops, as well as British, Canadian, and Indian units, fought hard for the island but lost to the overwhelming Japanese forces. They surrendered on Christmas Day in 1941—what the locals would call “Black Christmas.”

The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong followed. From the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, the Japanese ruled with an iron fist. Lin and her mother were separated from her father, who was in Germany, forced to work for the German government. Though he could have brought his family to Germany, he had felt she was safer in Hong Kong, despite the conditions. They barely scraped by during the “three years and eight months,” as the occupation came to be known.

The situation on mainland China was far worse. The Japanese had invaded in July of 1937, beginning the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conflict was massive in scale and loss of human life; it would account for the majority of civilian and military casualties in the Pacific War and claim the lives of ten to twenty-five million Chinese civilians and over four million Chinese and Japanese military. The war in China exemplified a fact often forgotten about the Second World War: globally, more non-combatants perished than uniformed participants. Civilians in China and the Soviet Union suffered the most, but hunger and violence were a fact of life around the world in the early forties.