The Endless Steppe

The Endless Steppe is about Esther Hautzig's childhood. When Esther is 10 years old, she and her family, along with other Jews, are taken from their home in Vilnius (that time known as Wilno), Poland by the Russians. She and her family are sent on a long train ride to Siberia, are separated from one another, and are forced to work in horrible conditions in a gypsum mine. After some time her family is allowed to live in a hut in the nearby town of Rubtsovsk, but they do not have much money and need to find creative ways to make a small income. They also have trouble with the Russian language and the fact that Esther's father is conscripted to the front lines of the Russian army. After several years and the war's conclusion, Esther's father returns, and the exiled Jews are returned to Poland. Esther and her family come home to Vilnius, where they find that none of the people they knew before remain; all died in the Holocaust. They encounter unwelcome responses from the new inhabitants; this illustrates post-war anti-semitism in Poland. They also discover the irony that their exile to Siberia kept them safe from the Holocaust.

In 1941, young Esther Rudomin (as she was then called) lives a charmed existence in the pretty town of Vilnius (Wilno) in northeast Poland (now the capital of Lithuania). She is a somewhat spoiled only child living with her large extended family in a manor house owned by her grandparents, and her parents are wealthy and well-respected members of the Jewish community, largely due to her father's skilled trade as an electrical engineer. Despite the Nazi invasion and the Soviet occupation of their region, to 10-year-old Esther, the war is something that ends at her garden gate. One June day, Soviet soldiers arrive at their house declaring the Rudomins to be "capitalists and enemies of the people." Their house and valuables are seized, and Esther, her parents, and her paternal grandparents are packed into cattle cars and exiled to another part of the Soviet Union, which turns out to be a forced labour camp in Siberia. Three events happen during the move that would be revisited later: Esther is ordered by her mother to take her jewelry to the nearby home of her own mother, where Esther receives the darkest vision of her life; to never see her maternal grandmother again. When given a very brief amount of time to pack for the trip. Esther attempts to include a family photo album in her luggage, only to be overruled by her mother, who warns her they need to salvage as much as their wardrobe as they can for Siberia. During the arrest, Esther's uncle, who had planned a casual visit with her mother, runs out the door. The soldiers demand he be identified, but Esther's mother lies about him being a stranger to prevent association with the Rudomins and his likely arrest as well.

This first half of the book, Esther recalls the horrors of this world: the customary division of the healthy and weak, so that Esther, her parents, and her grandmother are separated from her grandfather; the nightmarish two month train journey with nothing more than watery soup (and an occasional meal of bread and cheese from one of the shops at the train stations they sometimes stop to refuel); the disorienting arrival in the camp; and the backbreaking work in a gypsum mine that they are forced to do. She also describes the unexpected mercies that exist alongside it: the local children who smuggle food to the slave labourers at considerable danger to themselves; the amnesty, requested by Britain, that allows the Poles to be released from the camp and to move to Rubtsovsk, a nearby village; and the kindness of the villagers, people with almost as little as the Rudomins, who enable them to survive their exile.