The Endless Steppe

by Esther Hautzig

  That spring, the trans-Siberian railway, besides bringing prisoners of war, carried enormous quantities of booty.

  When the tide turned, when the Russians pushed the Germans back into German territory and followed them there, the Russians did a massive retaliatory job of looting German homes, farms, and factories. Some of this loot was sent back to villages like ours in Siberia. Clothing, curtains, linen, silverware, all kinds of luxuries we had almost forgotten existed, were stored in a warehouse in the novostroyka. These things were distributed among the families of those whose fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons had been killed by the Germans.

  On May 8, 1945, the formal surrender took place at Reims. The war with Germany was over.

  That spring and summer was a violent time for the spirit: there had been deep sadness; and great joy; and then a tearless grief, some part of which would remain forever.

  Only a few weeks before the great news that Germany had been defeated, there had been the announcement of President Roosevelt’s death. We in the Polish community wept; we had lost our knight on a white horse, our hero who would save us. ‘Who will take care of us now?’ Grandmother wailed. We had never counted on anyone so much as we had on President Roosevelt – and the United States Army – to save us from the Germans. ‘Who is this Truman person?’ we asked each other – We had never heard of this man who was now going to be president of the greatest country on earth. We were afraid for ourselves and also we had truly loved Roosevelt.

  Then came the joy over the end of the war. As far as we were concerned, once the fighting had stopped in Europe it was the end for us.

  And then came the most terrible news of all. It came from survivors of the concentration camps, from their letters, by word of mouth, from the Red Cross. It came: all the members of my father’s family – his brothers and his sisters, their children, his aunts, his uncles, his cousins – not one of them had survived the German massacre of the Jews. Of my mother’s family, we heard that only two cousins and an aunt survived. My mother’s brother, sister, her mother – my darling grandmother – her aunts and uncles, my beloved cousins, all were dead.

  My mother tortured herself as she thought of the day she had told the Russian soldier she didn’t know who the man at the door was. Perhaps if she had said that he was her brother, he would be alive.

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps …

  But we were alive. Our exile had saved our lives. Now we felt ourselves to be supremely lucky to have been deported to Siberia. Hunger, cold, and misery were nothing; life had been granted us. As Mother and Grandmother lit the kerosene lamps for our dead and said their prayers, I joined them in thanking God for having saved us.

  One day, I asked Mother whether I might write to our caretaker, Stanislav, in Vilna. I wanted to know if the photograph albums had been saved. Now I had a deep hunger for them; I needed my past, my beloved past.

  Mother said it was all right to write, but she doubted that I would get a reply.

  I wrote the letter and waited. Waiting, sometimes I evoked my own pictures of the past. A beam of sunlight coming through the curtains of my bedroom. The lilac tree in the garden. But I was careful not to people these pictures; it was too soon for that.

  After some months, a letter came from Stanislav saying that nothing remained. The Germans had completely looted our house. No, there were no pictures, nor did he have any among his own possessions.

  It was a crushing blow. All that remained would be in our hearts. If only Mother had let me take the albums that morning …

  When the war with Japan was over in August, we received a leter from Father. He said he would not return to the village.

  Mother said, ‘Thank God for that. Thank God he won’t be coming back to this forsaken place. If he can only get back to Poland, then perhaps he will be able to get us out of here …’

  I did not join my mother in this prayer. I wanted Father to come back to the village, where I could be certain we would be together again. The thought of his making his way back to Poland – who knew how? – and of disappearing there frightened me. More likely than not, he would not be able to get us out and we would never see him again.

  ‘Mother – why don’t we ask Father to come back here? The war is over. Life will not be so bad here. We have friends here. Why can’t we live here? Please tell Tata to come back to us –’

  ‘Esther! Don’t tell me you want to stay here!’

  She was shocked. And so was I. All my feelings and all my thoughts were a tangle of confusion. I was like some little animal that had been in the trap too long for freedom. I was like the people who had stayed behind in the mine to freeze to death. I was desperately, terribly afraid of change. Perhaps the thought of going back to a world no longer inhabited by people I loved had something to do with it.

  It was near the end of August when we had this first conversation about going back to Poland, a conversation that was to become a dialogue charged with emotion. The cubicle we called home was broiling hot; flies were buzzing all around us; our supper of watery potato soup was simmering on the stove.

  And I did not want to leave this?

  Well, I did love my school, didn’t I? And my teachers. And my friends. And I suppose I had become used to this life. And I think that somewhere inside me there was something else – some little pleasurable pride that the little rich girl of Vilna had endured poverty just as well as anyone else.

  I had forgotten what life was like ‘back there’. Beautiful things and lovely cars and delicious food had become dim memories; life in Poland, even our home, had become a fantasy. Reality was here, in Siberia; I could cope with reality.

  If Father came back here maybe we could make a life for ourselves here in the village. Maybe we could move to a nicer house in the novostroyka. Maybe Father could even get a job in the factory.

  I tried to say some of this to Mother and she looked at me as if I had become a stranger, perhaps a traitor. Certainly not a political one, but in a tribal sense?

  ‘Esther!’ Her voice became shrill with disbelief.

  Then I told Mother that I was afraid to go back, afraid to meet new people, afraid to live in a big city again.

  ‘You foolish child,’ she said. ‘You are fifteen years old and you talk like a baby. What is there to be afraid of back there? What could possibly be worse than being here? Just let us pray that we can leave this godforsaken place. I am sick and tired of it.’

  I looked at her. These words were written in her hair, the beautiful jet-black hair that was beginning to grey, the green eyes that were beginning to fail her. Even her teeth. She had contracted a gum disease and her teeth were beginning to fall out. Yes, Mother was sick and tired. She needed rest and decent food and freedom from worry; above everything else, she needed freedom.

  And she needed Father. She was lonely for Father.

  Mother became possessed by a wild, fierce desire to be free, to get back to Poland. She would lose her temper and scold me if I expressed my fears at leaving, my wish to remain.

  Her tension grew when she learned that Uncle Yozia and Aunt Zaya were to return to Kharkov. Every day she would hear of another friend, another acquaintance who was leaving.

  I tried to understand her unhappiness, but I prayed that some happy solution would be found for all of us. I didn’t dare write to Father asking him to come back to the village against Mother’s wishes. So I did the next best thing. I wrote short letters to him filled with expressions of the pleasures of living in Siberia: I told him how much more pleasant life was becoming, how much I loved school, how many friends I had. I told him that there was to be another declamation contest and that this time when I entered it, I would wear my navy-blue shoes. And who knew? perhaps this time I would win it.

  Father wrote back that he was delighted that my life had become easier, but that he could not wait for the day when he would be released and permitted to return to Poland. His plan, his great hope, was that he would stop in Vilna – a part of Russia n
ow – to see our home and then he would continue on to Warsaw or Lodz or some other big industrial city in Poland where he would start his life again.

  Tata, too.

  One day we received a letter. One glance showed that it was not from Father. It was another of those big, official-looking envelopes, the kind that sent shivers through us. Mother opened it and let out a scream! I froze with fear: the old cry – dear God, now what?

  ‘We are going back to Poland,’ she said and burst into tears.

  Mother who had been brave and strong, the Rock of Gibraltar throughout the years in Siberia, who had kept her sorrows, her loneliness, her troubles to herself, now wept like a baby from joy and relief – and perhaps some fear too of what was to come.

  The deportees were to be sent back to Poland, but not to Vilna. It was official and final: Poland, yes; home, no.

  As Mother became more and more gay, I tried to hide my own fears, my own unhappiness.

  ‘Imagine,’ Mother would say, ‘we will not have to plant any potatoes next spring and worry about getting them through the summer. Can you imagine how wonderful that will be?’

  I tried to oblige Mother with my imagination.

  ‘And if God is good to us, we will see Tata soon.’

  I joined Mother in that wish, fervently; the possibility of seeing Father again was the only truly bright spot in that unknowable future.

  Presently, the first fearful step into that future was taken. Father wrote to us that he had been released from the brigade and that he had made his way to Vilna.

  ‘Vilna!’ I interrupted Mother, who was reading the letter out loud to Grandmother and me. ‘Tata went back to Vilna!’

  Mother could barely continue; the tears began to drop down her cheeks and her voice shook as she read:

  Our house is still there and our apartment is in good condition. Much of our furniture is there too, but none of our personal belongings. I looked for photographs for Esther, but I could find none anywhere. When I rang our doorbell, a fierce-looking man greeted me: ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I am Samuel Rudomin and I used to live in this house. I just came to see it and to bid it goodbye forever.’

  ‘Well, bid it goodbye and get out of here.’

  ‘And who are you?’ I asked the man.

  ‘I am the chief of the N.K.V.D. in Vilna.’ And so, Raya and Esther, I left our home and I went …

  Mother had to stop reading aloud and Grandmother and I had to read for ourselves that Father went to the cemetery outside Vilna to visit the graves of relatives and friends to bid them goodbye. And then … and then he went to the places where some of our family had been massacred and he bid them goodbye.

  ‘I will try to get to Lodz,’ he wrote, ‘and I will write to you from there. Be well and give my love to my mother. Take care of yourselves, for soon we all will be together and I want you to be well and in good spirits. This won’t go on much longer. With love, Samuel and your Tata.’

  Father was usually reserved when writing, but this letter was filled with deep emotion. We wept for what he had written, and for what he had left unsaid. That night the three of us, Mother, Grandmother, and I, wept for our dead.

  Little by little, I tried to begin to adjust to the great new upheaval in my life.

  ‘Mama, I would like to have sapogy to wear back to Poland, the elegant ones that those other girls wear here. And a fufaika, Mama, a green one. I would love to have that, too.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Esther, this is not what they will wear in Poland.’

  ‘How do you know, Mama?’

  Mama’s face clouded. I could see that my question raised the disturbing one that even she could not ignore; what would the plundered, ravaged post-war Poland be like? Would it really be home?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. And then because she must have begun to understand my fear and that I needed help to work it out, she said: ‘Very well, Esther, perhaps you should have sapogy and a fufaika. But you will have to earn the money for it. We have nothing left to sell. If you can get some knitting and if you can be paid with roubles – not food –’

  Sapogy and a fufaika. Knee-high, shiny leather boots and a green quilted jacket. They became my obsession; the magic garments that would make me invincible on the dark journey back from exile.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The journey back began where it had first started, in the village square. Late in the autumn, when the wind had already begun and the first snow already covered the stones that had been like hot coals that first day, the Polish deportees were called to a meeting. Those of us who were left, that is. Many were dead – of influenza and typhus, some of old age, some of their frailty, some of broken hearts. Those of us who were left gathered in a holiday spirit and greeted friends and acquaintances with the particular camaraderie of people who have been through a thing or two together and have survived.

  This time we knew what we had been called to hear: the final confirmation and the details of our repatriation. We were told that the road back was to begin in March.

  It would be our last winter in Siberia!

  The excitement was enormous and I was infected by it. Momentarily, I forgot my fears; or perhaps in the hope that it would cure me of them, I gave way to an almost hysterical excitement at the prospect of the journey.

  And the prospect of owning sapogy and the fufaika. It had been more than wise of Mother to consent to my buying them (if I had enough money); it had been inspired. I began not to care where I was going so long as I went there wearing my shiny boots and my green quilted fufaika.

  I found work – and wool – and I knitted furiously, this time for cold, hard cash. Before he left, as a farewell gift, Uncle Yozia gave me some roubles which Mother allowed me to accept.

  Sometimes Mother became anxious about the sapogy and the fufaika. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to try to get some fabric and make myself a dress?

  ‘But you promised, Mama! My coat is so old and so short and so shabby. Tata will think I’m beautiful in the fufaika.’

  She smiled and argued no more; she understood.

  The schoolwork went on as usual. I tried not to think of how much I would miss Anna Semyonovna and my friends – Svetlana, Katiusha, Zina … and Shurik. I tried not to think of what it would be like to start all over again – new school, new friends.

  But when I walked the steppe, I could not keep from thinking about the city. I found that I had forgotten what it was like to walk paved streets, to walk in the midst of automobiles and trolley cars and buses, to be surrounded by high buildings. I had come to love the steppe, the huge space, and the solitude. Living in the crowded little huts, the steppe had become the place where a person could think her thoughts, sort out her feelings, and do her dreaming.

  Feelings are untidy; beneath all the pleasurable excitement, I still had a deep fear of going back to a city.

  In December of 1945, Anna Semyonovna announced that there was to be another declamation contest and that it would take place in March.

  This time I was invited to enter it by Anna Semyonovna, this woman whose finest faintest praise was like a laurel wreath on my head.

  I told her how I longed to take part in it, but we were due to go back to Poland in March.

  ‘But, Anna Semyonovna, do you think I could sign up for it just in case –?’

  She gave her permission and when she asked me what I would like to recite, without a moment’s hesitation I said, ‘Tatyana’s dream’.

  A second chance. I would heal a wound that was still painful to think about; this time I would not only have shoes, but sapogy!

  And so I began to work on Tatyana’s dream and this time it was to be a race with a train that would take me out of exile.

  Shurik came to our hut almost every day now as our time together was running out. He listened to me recite Tatyana’s dream; and he listened and he listened. He was a patient boy. And he also talked to me about his plans. His fath
er was a colonel in the Red Army and when he was released, Shurik and his mother would rejoin him in Leningrad where they used to live. And there, Shurik would go to military academy and become a soldier too.

  ‘Shurik,’ I would say to him, ‘why do you want to be a soldier? Wars are horrible. Look what they have done to us, to our families. One people fighting another people, what’s the sense of it? Shurik, why don’t you be a musician instead?’

  And he would answer, ‘But every country has to have an army and I want to be in mine. You’ll never understand because you’re not a boy.’

  He was right; I never did understand.

  While I knitted, Shurik read to me. My eyes had become badly strained and I could no longer read and knit at the same time. Shurik read me Dickens’ Dombey and Son and stories by Dumas. Dumas sent me into daydreams of beautiful balls and lovely ladies swooning over lovers. Dickens presented a different picture. Florence Dombey had had a rough time of it in a rough world, but everything had come out all right in the end – which I found quite comforting when my daydreams failed me. Dickens, Dumas, Jack London – they had helped me escape from Siberia and now they would help me on the road back.

  The contest was scheduled for March 18, and on the first of March, we received word that we were to leave on the fifteenth!

  I was heartbroken. To miss the contest by three days!

  I bought my sapogy and my fufaika. Shurik went with me after school. It didn’t take long; I knew exactly what I wanted. The sapogy were black and soft and shiny; the fufaika was green and quilted. Shurik said I looked very nice in them.

  Every night I took them out and tried them on.

  Shurik came to help us pack (as if our belongings couldn’t have been packed in an hour) and his mother sent some flour and half a dozen eggs for us to bake some biscuits for the road. Shurik and I rolled out the dough together and baked the biscuits in Natasha’s oven.

  And Anna Semyonovna sent for Mother.

  Anna Semyonovna too wished to give me a farewell present. She knew how crushed I was about missing the contest and she wondered whether Mother wouldn’t consent to taking a later train, if there was one.