The Endless Steppe

Last updated
The Endless Steppe
Author Esther Hautzig
Cover artistCaroline Binch
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreAutobiography
PublisherHarper Collins
Publication date
1968
Media typePrint Hardcover, Hardback & Paperback

The Endless Steppe (1968) is a book by Esther Hautzig, describing her and her family's exile to Siberia during World War II. [1]

Contents

Summary

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 Vilna, Poland, by the Russians. She and her family are sent on a long train ride to Siberia, 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 Wilno, where they find none of the people they knew before remain (died in the Holocaust) and unwelcome responses from the new inhabitants (post-war anti-semitism in Poland). They also discover the irony that their exile to Siberia kept them safe from the Holocaust.

Memoir

In 1941, young Esther Rudomin (as she was then called) lives a charmed existence in the pretty town of Vilna (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.

The Rudomins go from privileged complacency, in which they rely on servants to do everything for them, to a world where the growth of a potato plant can mean the difference between life and death. Esther is also forced to rely on making clothes for the few rich people of the villagethe sort of people they had been in Polandfor the price of a bit of bread and milk. She almost absorbs the harsh Soviet message of their exile, feeling a perverse pride that "the little rich girl of Vilna survived poverty as well as anyone else." She also recalls the baracholka (flea market) in Siberia, a weekly swap meet where the people engage in vibrant trade.

Besides the hardships of Siberia, other horrid news comes, first that Esther's paternal grandfather was transported to a logging camp in another part of the country where he soon fell ill. His problems are overlooked, not losing sight of the "big picture", as "there were trees that needed to be cut down", and he soon died from pneumonia and bronchitis. Much later in the story, she learns that all her matrilineal family members perished in the Holocaust. Her patrilineal family members were also sent to the concentration camps, although a scant number surivied. Her father, who flees Rubtsovsk and eventually finds his way back to Vilna, writes that he visited their former house one last time (now in possession of an NKVD chief in the city), but failed to find photographs or like family mementos, the house having totally looted by the Germans. For Esther, this represents crushing news that her past is gone forever. She remarks how her maternal grandmother, her aunts and uncles and beloved cousins are all dead, and the deportation ironically saved her parents, paternal grandmother and herself. Esther's mother is distraught at the news as well, wishing now she had said Esther's uncle was a blood relative on their last morning in Vilna as he would have been taken with them.

Esther marvels at the irony of a "little capitalist" singing the Internationale , learning Russian, and eventually falling in love with the unique, unspoiled beauty of the steppe, so much so that when the war ends and the Rudomins are abruptly informed that they are to be returned to Poland, Esther doesn't want to leave. She thinks of herself as belonging there: she's a Sibiryak, a Siberian. Nearly five years into her exile, the trains return them to Poland in the city of Lodz, where they are reunited with her father.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ghetto uprisings</span> Jewish armed uprisings against Nazi Germany

The ghetto uprisings during World War II were a series of armed revolts against the regime of Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1943 in the newly established Jewish ghettos across Nazi-occupied Europe. Following the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were targeted from the outset. Within months inside occupied Poland, the Germans created hundreds of ghettos in which they forced the Jews to live. The new ghettos were part of the German official policy of removing Jews from public life with the aim of economic exploitation. The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions and lack of food resulted in a high death rate among them. In most cities the Jewish underground resistance movements developed almost instantly, although ghettoization had severely limited their access to resources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abba Kovner</span> Lithuanian-Israeli poet, writer, and partisan leader (1918–1987)

Abba Kovner was a Polish-born Jewish partisan leader, and later Israeli poet and writer. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a target of the Holocaust identified the German plan to murder all Jews. His attempt to organize a ghetto uprising failed, but he fled into the forest, joined Soviet partisans, and survived the war. After the war, Kovner led Nakam, a paramilitary organization of Holocaust survivors who sought to take genocidal revenge by murdering six million German people, but Kovner was arrested in the British zone of Occupied Germany before he could successfully carry out his plans. He made aliyah to the State of Israel in 1947. Considered one of the greatest authors of Modern Hebrew poetry, Kovner was awarded the Israel Prize in 1970.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abraham Sutzkever</span> Belarusian-Israeli poet

Abraham Sutzkever was an acclaimed Yiddish poet. The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was "the greatest poet of the Holocaust."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rubtsovsk</span> City in Altai Krai, Russia

Rubtsovsk is a city in Altai Krai, Russia, located on the Aley River 281 kilometers (175 mi) southwest of Barnaul. Population: 147,002 (2010 Census); 163,063 (2002 Census); 171,792 (1989 Census); 167,000 (1975); 111,000 (1959); 38,000 (1939).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zinaida Volkova</span> Russian Marxist

Zinaida Lvovna Volkova was a Russian Marxist. She was Leon Trotsky's first daughter by his first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, a Marxist from Nikolaev (Ukraine). She was raised by her aunt Yelizaveta, sister of Trotsky, after their parents divorced. Her younger sister, Nina, stayed with her mother.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vilna Ghetto</span> Ghetto for Jews in Lithuania in World War II

The Vilna Ghetto was a World War II Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius in the modern country of Lithuania, at the time part of the Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland.

Kitty Hart-Moxon, OBE is a Polish-British Holocaust survivor. She was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1943 at age 16, where she survived for two years, and was also imprisoned at other camps. Shortly after her liberation, she moved to England with her mother, where she married and dedicated her life to raising awareness of the Holocaust. She has written two autobiographies entitled I am Alive (1961) and Return to Auschwitz (1981).

Esther R. Hautzig was a Polish-born American writer, best known for her award-winning book The Endless Steppe (1968).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ponary massacre</span> 1941–1944 Nazi murders in Vilnius, Lithuania

The Ponary massacre, or the Paneriai massacre, was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and their Lithuanian collaborators, including Ypatingasis būrys killing squads, during World War II and the Holocaust in the Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary, a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 20,000 Poles, and 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilna (Vilnius), and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.

Mother Bertranda, O.P., later known as Anna Borkowska, was a Polish cloistered Dominican nun who served as the prioress of her monastery in Kolonia Wileńska near Wilno. She was a graduate of the University of Kraków who had entered the monastery after her studies. During World War II, under her leadership, the nuns of the monastery sheltered 17 young Jewish activists from Vilnius Ghetto and helped the Jewish Partisan Organization (FPO) by smuggling weapons. In recognition of this, in 1984 she was awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hirsh Glick</span> Lithuanian poet and partisan

Hirsch Glick was a Jewish poet and partisan.

<i>Dreams of My Russian Summers</i> French novel by Andrei Makine

Dreams of My Russian Summers is a French novel by Andrei Makine, originally published in 1995. It won two top French awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. The novel is told from the first-person perspective and tells the fictional story of a boy's memories and experiences with his French grandmother in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and '70s.

Luba Bielicka Blum was a Polish socialist activist of the Bund, and a nurse in the Warsaw Ghetto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Schoschana Rabinovici</span> Lithuanian writer

Schoschana Rabinovici was a Holocaust survivor and the author of the memoir Dank meiner Mutter (1994) which was published in the United States in 1998 under the title Thanks to My Mother. Of Lithuanian-Jewish heritage, she survived Vilnius Ghetto and the Kaiserwald and Stutthof Nazi concentration camps as a young girl.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rachel Zilberberg</span> Polish Jewish activist

Rachel (Sarenka) Zylberberg was an underground activist and participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She held a key role in rousing the rebellion. Zylberberg was a member of Hashomer Hatzair, the Zionist-socialist youth movement. After the German invasion of Poland at the onset of World War II, she left the capital for Wilno in northeastern part of prewar Poland, then returned to Warsaw together with Chajka (Chaikeh) Grossman and was actively involved in the Jewish resistance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cemach Feldstein</span>

Cemach Feldstein ([t͡ʃɛɱɑħ fɛldstajn]; sometimes spelled Tzemach; Hebrew: צמח פלדשטיין; Yiddish: פעלדשטיין; Lithuanian: Feldsteinas; Russian: Семён Григорович Фельдштейн, Semyon Grigorovitch; December 30, 1884 - December 29, 1944 was a Lithuanian educator, author, an education reformist, a culture Zionist activist. As an educator he was served as the director of several Jewish gymnasiums, the most notable of which was the Hebrew Real-Gymnasium in Kaunas, Lithuania, where most of the subjects were taught in Modern Hebrew.

Rywka Lipszyc was a Polish-born Jewish diarist and Holocaust survivor. She was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp followed by a transfer to Gross-Rosen and forced labor at its subcamp in Christianstadt. She was then taken on a death march to Bergen-Belsen, and was liberated there in April 1945. Too ill to be evacuated, she was transferred to a hospital at Niendorf, where the record of her life ended.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shmerke Kaczerginski</span>

Shmaryahu "Shmerke" Kaczerginski was a Yiddish-speaking poet, musician, writer and cultural activist. Born to a poor family in Vilna and orphaned at a young age, Kaczerginski was educated at the local Talmud Torah and night school, where he became involved in communist politics and was regularly beaten or imprisoned.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baranavichy Ghetto</span> Ghetto in Baranavichy, Belarus

Exile of Jews to the interior of the Soviet Union during World War II refers to the mass deportation and internment by the Soviet Union of large numbers of Polish Jewish refugees from areas of Poland, and other areas which were occupied by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union during World War II. These are refugees who were interned by the Soviet Union in various camps during World War II.

References

  1. The Endless Steppe at WorldCat

Further reading

Donald Cameron Watt (1989), How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-1939, New York: Pantheon Books, ISBN   9780394579160 , OCLC 19921655 .