The Endless Steppe

by Esther Hautzig

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  FOLLOW PENGUIN

  About the Book

  Esther Rudomin was ten years old when, in 1941, she and her family were arrested by the Russians for being ‘capitalists’ and transported to the endless steppe of Siberia. This is the very moving true story of the next five years spent in exile, of how the Rudomins kept their courage high, though they went barefoot and hungry.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Esther Hautzig was born in Eastern Poland (in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania) in October, 1930. When the region was conquered by Soviet troops in 1941, Esther, her parents and her grandparents were uprooted and exiled to Siberia where they spent the next five years in forced labour camps. The family returned home after the war and in 1947 Esther left to go to the USA as a student. Her acclaimed novel The Endless Steppe was inspired by her gruelling wartime experiences. She was married to a concert pianist and had two children. Esther died in 2009.

  This story would not have been told

  without the help of many, many people.

  It is gratefully dedicated to all of them.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The morning it happened – the end of my lovely world – I did not water the lilac bush outside my father’s study.

  The time was June 1941 and the place was Vilna, a city in the north-eastern corner of Poland. And I was ten years old and took it quite for granted that all over the globe people tended their gardens on such a morning as this. Wars and bombs stopped at the garden gates, happened on the far side of garden walls.

  Our garden was the centre of my world, the place above all others where I wished to remain forever. The house we lived in was built around this garden, its red-tiled roof slanting towards it. It was a very large and dignified house with a white plaster façade. The people who lived in it were my people, my parents, my paternal grandparents, my aunts and my uncles and my cousins. My grandfather owned the house, my grandmother ruled the house; they lived rather majestically in their own apartment, and the rest of us lived in six separate apartments. Separate, but not exactly private. There were no locked doors; people were always rushing in and out of each other’s apartments to borrow things, to gossip, to boast a bit or complain a bit, or to tell the latest family joke. It was a great, exuberant, busy, loving family, and heaven for an only child. Behind the windows looking out on our garden there were no strangers, no enemies, no hidden danger.

  Beyond the garden, beginning with the tree-lined avenue we lived on, was Vilna, my city. For the best view of Vilna one went to the top of Castle Hill, and I was always asking Miss Rachel, my governess, to take me there. Built along the banks of the river Wilja in a basin of green hills, Vilna has been called a woodland capital. It was a university town, a city of parks and white churches with gold and red towers built by Italian architects in an opulent baroque style, a city of lovely old houses hugging the hills and each other. It was a spirited and gay city for a child to grow up in.

  From this hilltop I could make out the place where my family’s business took up half a block, the synagogue we attended, the road that led to the idyllic lake country where we had our summer house. When I stood on this hilltop everything was just as it should be in this best of all possible worlds, my world.

  And, down to the smallest detail, I would not have had any of it changed. What I ate for breakfast on school mornings was one buttered roll – a soft roll, not a hard roll – and one cup of cocoa; any attempt to alter this menu I regarded as a plot to poison me.

  I would sit down to this breakfast at a round table in the dining room with my young parents or my beloved Miss Rachel. My Father – called Tata, the Polish for papa – was my most favourite person in the world, a secret I thought I ought to keep from Mama. Tata was gay and fun-loving and not only made jokes himself, but laughed at mine – whether mine were funny or not.

  Mama was gay, too, with an engaging talent for laughing over spilled milk, but at an early age I found out that she was a strong-minded lady who thought that one indulgent parent was quite enough for an only child. When I was four years old, she and I first locked horns. I had just begun to attend a progressive nursery school, and one morning, when I and a dozen or so other little girls were doing calisthenics on the floor, I made a shattering discovery. All legs had been swung back over heads, all toes were touching the floor, when, rolling my eyes from side to side, I saw that all the panties thus displayed were silk – white, pink, blue, yellow silk, a gorgeous rainbow of silk panties, some even edged with lace – except mine. Mine were white cotton, severely unadorned. I told Mama that this situation must be corrected immediately. She thought not. I said that if I could not wear silk panties I would not go to nursery school at all. Mama said: ‘Very well. Don’t go.’ I didn’t go; I stayed home until it was time for me to go to grade school when I was seven.

  And when it came to choosing the school, Mama decided it was character-building for a rich child to go to a school where there were children from all economic brackets. I went to the Sophia Markovna Gurewitz School, where I learned Yiddish and was introduced to the literature and culture of my people.

  I loved school and I loved the order of my life. My days were planned with the precision of a railway timetable. On Mondays after school there were piano lessons; Tuesdays, dancing class; Wednesdays I went to the library and invariably argued with the librarian, who recommended children’s books when I wanted grown-up books, particularly mysteries and the more blood-curdling the better. On Thursdays my cousins and I had calisthenics with a muscular lady who drilled us as if we were candidates for the Prussian Army, which made us explode into giggles. And on Fridays I was allowed to help Mama and the cook prepare the Sabbath meals – braid the challah, the ritual bread, and chop the noodles. On Fridays, the seven kitchens of our house would send forth the marvellous smells of seven Sabbath meals all alike – the same breads, sponge cakes, chickens, and chicken soup.

  But in 1939 Hitler’s armies marched on Poland.

  When the first bombs fell over Vilna I was terrified, of course. But we were lucky; no bombs fell in our garden. Our garden was invulnerable.

  To be sure, there were changes.

  Tata was drafted into the Polish Army to fight the German invaders. But Mama assured me that he would come back. She continued to do so in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. And since I had great faith in Mama, I believed her. I was the only one who did.

  Shortly after Tata left, word came that his entire battalion had been wiped out. Our family was stricken with a deep and inconsolable grief. Everyone, that is, except Mama and me. Mama told them to stop their weeping, that Tata was alive. They looked up from their grief and begged her to come to her senses and accept the dreadful reality. They understood that this aberration came from her great love for her husband, but when she went so far as to have a fight with the rabbi about it, they were beside themselves.

  On a Monday morning, Mama woke up and announced to anyone who would listen to her that Tata would be back in Vilna on Thursday. She advised everyone to stop weeping and prepare for his ret
urn. ‘Be sure to get me some farmer’s cheese, the kind he adores,’ she said to her poor mother, who now wept not only for the lost son-in-law, but for the daughter gone crazy. Mama herself had our house shined up from top to bottom and our larder stocked with Tata’s favourite foods.

  On Thursday, Tata returned, just as Mama had predicted. But by way of preparing everyone for the surprise, he stopped at his mother-in-law’s house first. My grandmother opened the door, took one look at this ‘ghost’ and screamed: ‘Oh, dear Lord, I didn’t get the cheese.’

  At eight, I took Mama’s psychic powers for granted.

  Over and over Tata told us how he had walked from village to village, after his battalion was disbanded. The few men who had survived were told to make their way home as best they could. Dressed in a blanket and with a beret on his head, pretending he was mad, Tata had had many narrow escapes before he came back to us.

  He was home, but in the next two years there would be other changes. In 1940 the Russians, who were allies of Germany from 1939 until July 1941, occupied Vilna. The communist authorities confiscated the family business and our property, but did not evict us from our house, our garden. The servants left and Miss Rachel got married. One didn’t always have small luxuries, but I didn’t miss them.

  My world was still intact and I had not the slightest premonition that it was about to end.

  The morning it happened I awakened very early for a reason. Since school was over I was allowed to sleep late. Naturally, in order to enjoy such a special privilege one had to be awake.

  The minute I opened my eyes and saw my pink and white curtains fluttering in the soft breeze blowing off the Wilja, I knew it was going to be a beautiful day, a perfect June day. Heeding our family tradition, I was careful to slip out of bed with my right foot forward. Right foot forward, good luck for the day; left foot forward, bad luck. In Poland, one listened to one’s family if one wanted good luck.

  I went to the window to see if Grandfather was in the garden. This garden was the pride and joy of his life. It was he who gave the gardeners their orders, scolded when a tree had not been properly pruned, was lavish with his praise when an ailing plant was saved. ‘Remember, children,’ he would say to my cousins and me, ‘remember that there is always some good in people who love flowers.’

  That morning, Grandfather was not in the garden. But I leaned out of the window for a minute to admire the roses and the peonies and the lilac bush which I would water in an hour or two I thought.

  It must have been about six o’clock.

  I picked up the mystery I had been saving for just such a morning, and went back to bed with it. From the opening sentence, I was lost to the rest of the world. Hence, I heard nothing.

  I was well into the book when my mother burst into the room.

  ‘You must get up immediately,’ she said, stripping the bedclothes off me.

  ‘But why? Mama –’ I was outraged.

  ‘Esther, for once do as you’re told without asking questions. Quickly!’

  I jumped out of bed.

  ‘Mama – what is it?’

  ‘Questions, always questions. Keep your voice down.’ She had dropped hers to a whisper. ‘Esther – something is happening. Uncle David called. He said – he said that Russian soldiers were swarming all over Grandfather’s apartment. Your father rushed there. He didn’t even stop to dress. He’s still in his pyjamas. And he isn’t back yet. Please get dressed as fast as you can and come right to my room.’

  Russian soldiers! I didn’t argue; I did as I was told, braiding my hair as I went. I found my mother sitting on her bed with a large kitchen matchbox on her lap. What on earth was Mama planning to do with matches in her bedroom? And why was she looking at me so oddly? Could she be frightened?

  ‘You are to take this box to my mother’s house, Esther, to your Grandmother Sara. Immediately.’

  ‘A matchbox? To Grandmother Sara? Whatever for?’

  ‘Esther!’ Her voice was trembling. ‘Stop asking questions! Just do as you’re told. Take this box to your grandmother. I have a feeling we won’t be needing what I’ve put inside. I want Grandmother to have it. You are to leave by way of the garden gate. Don’t go out on the street. Go through the alleys. Go quickly and come back as quickly as you can. Do you hear me? You are not to linger at your grandmother’s, not for one extra minute.’

  I almost dropped the box.

  ‘Esther –’ Mama’s voice became gentle ‘– Esther, I’m sorry that I was cross but – oh, do hurry, for God’s sake, hurry!’

  I was scared. More scared than I had been when Vilna was being bombed. Even a child soon learns what bombing is all about, learns to know what might happen, and to be relieved when it doesn’t. But now I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know how to say my prayer, how to bargain with God. One needed to be explicit, I thought as a child – ‘Dear God, please do not let the bomb fall on the Rudomin house on Great Pogulanka Avenue in Vilna. If you will be kind enough to see that this doesn’t happen, I promise that I will try not to talk back to my mother tomorrow …’ I had tried to bargain fairly during the German bombings in 1939. But now I couldn’t pray. There was no dark bomb shelter, no lap in which to bury my face when the bomb was too close, no soothing words from Mama to ease the terror of glass breaking and bricks falling.

  I ran through my father’s study into the garden. The minute I crossed the door, I knew I had made a mistake. I had put my left foot forward. I wanted to go back and start over again with the right foot, but was afraid to waste time. As I ran, I touched the lilacs and inhaled their fragrance. I would water them later. The garden had not changed; my garden was just as beautiful, just as safe as always. As if there were nothing to threaten my life in it, it would be waiting for me when I returned from this bewildering errand. I went to the back gate and out into the alley.

  I flew through the alley. Mercifully, it was deserted that morning. Running as fast as I could, within ten minutes I was at the apartment house where my grandmother lived. But once there, I did have to stop to catch my breath before I could climb the stairs two at a time.

  There was no answer to my first ring, nor to my second. I pounded on the door with the heel of my shoe. Finally my grandmother’s sleepy voice called out, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Me, Grandmother. Let me in.’

  She opened the door and began firing questions at me: Why was I visiting so early? Why was I out of breath? What was in the box? I wanted to shout at her the way my mother had: No questions! I don’t have the answers! Instead, I told her what I knew, that soldiers were in Grandfather Solomon’s house, that Tata went there in his pyjamas. ‘In his pyjamas?’ she asked, as if this were the most terrifying fact of all. Yes, in his pyjamas, I repeated, beginning to react to this with terror myself.

  I handed her the box and when she opened it we both gaped.

  My mother’s emeralds and other jewels were lying there in that kitchen matchbox – her necklace, earrings, and all her rings. They looked so strange lying there out of their velvet boxes, like play jewellery.

  My grandmother closed the box. She shut her eyes and her lips moved in prayer.

  ‘Grandmother. I must go, Grandmother. Mama said I must come back quickly. Grandmother –? I guess Mama had a reason for sending you her jewellery –?’

  She went on with her praying. I stood on tiptoe and kissed her on the cheek. I hugged her and rested my cheek against her arm. I longed to tell her how much I loved her, how much she meant to me, how well I remembered all the days she spent with me when I was little, cutting out paper dolls and building cardboard houses. But there was no time. I could only manage to say, ‘I love you, Grandmother, I love you so much.’

  ‘Oh, my child – tell your mother –’

  She broke off and kissed the top of my head.

  ‘I will see you soon, Grandmother,’ I said as I ran out of the door.

  As I ran down the stairs, a terrible thought came to me; I would never see my gra
ndmother again. Oh, God, please don’t let me have such terrible thoughts, I prayed.

  I ran all the way home. When I reached the garden door, I could hear the front-doorbell ringing and ringing. Where was Mama?

  My mother was sitting in the dining room, at the empty dining table, resting her chin in her hand.

  ‘Mama, the doorbell is ringing. Don’t you hear it? Shall I open the door?’

  ‘No. I shall open it myself.’ But she still didn’t move. ‘Sit down, Esther. You’re out of breath. Did you give the box to Grandmother?’

  ‘Of course I did. Mama – the doorbell –’

  ‘Yes, the doorbell.’

  She rose slowly and, taking a long time to get there, she opened the door.

  My father was on the doorstep, his hands behind his back. Next to him stood two Russian soldiers with fixed bayonets.

  Not one word was spoken. Father and Mother exchanged a guarded look, but Father kept his eyes away from me, as if he was ashamed to have me see him in pyjamas with bayonets at his back. Slowly and silently, Father walked through the hall, past the umbrella stand with his walking sticks, into the dining room. The soldiers walked heavily beside him. When they reached the centre of the room, the silence was broken. One of the soldiers shouted:

  ‘Down on the floor! All of you! You’re under arrest!’

  Clearly, before we would do such a silly thing, my father would explain everything and the soldiers would go away. He had not done anything wrong – neither stolen, nor killed anyone, nor committed any other crime – they could not arrest him. He would insist that they apologize. But he remained silent. We sat on the floor – first my father, then me. For a second, I thought my mother would refuse to. My father must have thought so too because he murmured her name softly: ‘Raya –’ Very awkwardly, but determined to keep her back straight, my mother sat down on the floor too.

  How could we be arrested without having done anything wrong? I decided to find out.

  ‘Why are we under arrest?’ I asked.