The Endless Steppe

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

In 1941 Esther and her family are arrested by Soviet troops because they are capitalists and are taken away from their home in Vilna, Lithuania and transported to Siberia in Russia. On arrival, Esther's mother and father are forced to work in a gypsum mine, and Esther and her grandmother must work in the fields. Eventually Esther and her family get a hut of their own, and Esther attends a local school in Rubtsovsk, but they still have to face the cold of the Siberian winter, summer heat, constant hunger, and the conscription of Esther's father into the Red Army. There are some similarities between this work and The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank's Diary), as both are non-fiction books dealing with the horror of World War II, each told through the perspective of an adolescent Jewish girl; however, the background of The Endless Steppe is much less well known, and has a different outcome.

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, 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 grandparents are packed into cattle cars and "relocated" to another part of the great and mighty Soviet Union, which turns out to be a forced labour camp in Siberia.