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45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I spoke to Esther. Her book has impacted me for 22 years., April 7, 2003
Esther's wonderfully sincere and illustrative writing will hold even an adult's attention from cover to cover. I have read it over and over again for the last 22 years. As a child in 1979 at age 11, I found myself in my family's frozen garden pretending to be Esther herself, wandering through Siberia in search of frozen potatoes. When I would take a bath, after playing in the snow and getting chilled, I would revel in the marvelous heat of the water and imagine I had just been given a rare cake of soap. When thirsty, I would make myself wait for a drink of cool water from the tap until my throat was parched, so that the first drip of water on my tongue would be heavenly. I would then suck the water into my cheeks as Esther did and swallow very slowly, trying to make it last. My younger sister and I would walk into my dad's livestock truck and pretend we were on a cattle car headed for the Steppe, and we would make a makeshift hut under a log fort we had near the barnyard. Esther's life story filled my thoughts, my days and my head for years following, and reminded me to always care for others and not to take my life in rural United States for granted. Esther wrote in a way that made me feel as if I had somehow managed to form a personal friendship with her. In 1995, I was able to speak with Esther on the phone, and I have never forgotten that wonderful conversation. Talking with her (she still has a very noticable accent) was as if the book itself came to life, because I realized I was actually visiting with the woman who was the couragous child in the book. Esther's writing encouraged me to be thankful, to be grateful, to be kind, and to never give up. I majored in journalism in college, and though I have never had such an extreme happening in my lifetime, I hope to eventually put down in words something that will touch other's lives as Esther Hautzig touched mine.
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44 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Other Tyranny, January 8, 2001
This review is from: The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia (Paperback)
Here in America, when someone mentions the atrocities of World War II, most people think immediately of the Holocaust and Hitler's plan to rid the world of Jews and establish the German "master race". However, Hitler was not the only one during this time committing atrocities which killed millions of people. The Soviets were guilty of this as well, though this is not as well known to Americans. This is the story of a young girl who is a victim of the Soviet forced-labor camps. Her family did nothing wrong, but with the Russian invasion of Poland, her parents and grandparents were considered "capitalists" and therefore deported to Siberia. This book is very well written. The characters are very well deveoped, which is especially important since this book is autobiographical. Reading this gives a real sense of how far out in the middle of nowhere these people were. There is the beauty of this pristine land versus the terror which haunts the people who have been sent here, as well as the true desolation of the place. In time, Esther, who is 15 by the end of the book, really feels that this is the place her life is, rather than Poland, where she lived before, even though this is the place of her imprisonment. Hautzig also does a good job of describing the constant suffering and scrabbling for humanity that these people went through as political prisoners. It was a hopeless situation, but the one thing that they could least give up was hope. This is one of the very few children's (or young adult) books that does focus on what was happening in the Soviet Union during this time. There are many kids books which focus on the Germans and the Holocaust, but that was only part of the story, and to forget the rest of these people who suffered and died because of the same sort of tyranny is an affront to them.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Adjusting in the Worst of Times, January 23, 2000
This review is from: The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia (Paperback)
The Endless Steppe, by Esther Hautzig, is the true story of a young Jewish girl named Esther Rudomin, and her family living in Siberia. The Story takes place during World War II, when the wealthy Rudomin Family are pronounced capitalists. They're removed from their beautiful home and loved ones in Vilna, Poland. They are taken by train, along with peasant families to an endless steppe in Siberia where they are forced to work in various places, including a gypsum mine. Siberia lacks many necessities. The only way they are able to survive the harsh Siberian conditions is the thought that they must never be brought down. With the help of many friends along the way, the Rudomins eventually learn to fit into the Siberian puzzle. Every obstacle becomes part of their everyday life for five long years. I thought this was a great book because it shows how a wealthy family could survive in complete poverty during the worst of times. The book also showed how a once spoiled little girl, learned how to see life on the other side of the fence.
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