A decade or so ago, a fellow French teacher in my area was retiring and she bequeathed me a carload full of materials. Literally, I hauled the contents of her trunk -full to the brim- up three flights of stairs to my tiny one-bedroom apartment. It was a treasure trove of novels, books, CDs, and so on. I have since then shared the wealth with my own students, keeping a few novels for myself. There are still a handful of them that I have yet to read, but one that I stumbled across a few weeks ago was La Steppe Infinie, by Esther Kautzig (b. Rudomin).
Originally published in English under the title The Endless Steppe (1968), I had somehow never heard of Esther (Rudomin) Hautzig; her story wasn't even remotely familiar to me. A Polish Jew during WWII, La Steppe Infinie is something of a coming-of-age story that calls to mind The Diary of Anne Frank. Equally true, Hautzig shares her story with us through the lens of hindsight, putting pen to paper about 20 years after the events she describes. (Yes, she survived. Spoiler.) The result is a fascinating memoir of shock, tragedy, loss, hope, desperation, courage, and survival.
A ten-year-old daughter of a wealthy family, Esther is the only child of two educated and refined parents living in Vilnius, Poland (now Lithuania). Esther's family occupies an apartment in the much larger mansion-like home of her paternal grandparents. Hers is a privileged life surrounded by the aunts, uncles, and cousins who have the same living situation. Fancy dresses, beautiful toys, gardening with grandpa, extravagant parties and outings, a private governess (nanny? teacher?), everything a girl her age could want...is all suddenly torn from her life as two Russian soldiers burst into her family home, arresting her grandparents, parents, and her for being capitalists (read: successful business owners) in 1941. At gunpoint, they are given just moments to gather their belongings before being transported to some clandestine location. At the station, Esther's grandfather is separated from the group and sent to a work camp. After an abrupt and tearful goodbye, the remaining four are loaded into cattle cars -along with some familiar faces from around Vilnius- and their long journey to somewhere begins.
After weeks of living in squalid and claustrophobic conditions on board the cattle cars, Esther's family and the rest of the surviving passengers finally arrive in BFE Russia. Because they have long since passed the Ural Mountains, they know that they are somewhere in Siberia. Observing the arid landscape around them, the plateau seems vast, strange, and frightening. Almost immediately, everyone is put to work in the gypsum mines. Fortunately, they have arrived in summer, before the fabled Siberian winter sets in, but winter is never far off in Siberia. Even under the scorching sun with the warm winds whipping around and the flies biting, winter is on everyone's minds -including the locals'- because summer farming means winter survival. As such, Esther is put to work in a potato patch. At the end of the day, she rejoins her parents and grandmother in the barracks they share with the rest of the Polish slaves. Indeed, they are the lucky ones, because they haven't been sent to the Nazi work camps like many of their family and friends.
But the tides of war change and, with it, the allegiance of the Red Army. No longer an ally of Nazi Germany, Russia has joined with the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, along with others. But Poland remains occupied by Nazi forces, and the Rudomins must remain in Siberia. While they and their fellow Polish exiles are no longer prisoners, they must now adapt to living as refugees until the unknown end of the war. Or death. Whichever comes first.
Their exile ultimately lasts for five long years, during which the Rudomin family experiences both the unimaginable and the mundane - often at the same time, somehow. Esther goes through puberty and, as she herself states [my translation from the French, back into English], "The heart of a young girl is indestructible. In spite of the cold and the hunger, in this land of exile, mine beat wildly. I had fallen in love for the first time." In short, Esther experiences her first crush, reminding us that the everyday still happens, even when you're starving and freezing in Siberia.
No detail appears to be withheld in this candid account of life on the steppe. Scares with the Russian secret police (YIKES!), hunger, cold, fear, and longing are abundant in this story, but humor is found in strange places. A mesmerizing read, La Steppe Infinie was a difficult book for me to put down. I appreciate Hautzig's straightforward and direct narrative style (especially when I'm reading in a different language), and her story -while moving and unbelievable- is a simple one that will remain with me for years and years to come.
