The Endless Steppe (1968) is a memoir of survival[1] by Esther Hautzig, describing her exile with her immediate family to Siberia during World War II.

After some time her family is allowed to live in a hut in the nearby town of Rubtsovsk, but they do not have much money and need to find creative ways to make a small income.

In 1941, young Esther Rudomin (as she was then called) lives a charmed existence in the pretty town of Vilnius (Wilno) in northeast Poland (now the capital of Lithuania).

Their house and valuables are seized, and Esther, her parents, and her paternal grandparents are packed into cattle cars and exiled to another part of the Soviet Union, which turns out to be a forced labour camp in Siberia.

Esther attempts to include a family photo album in her luggage, only to be overruled by her mother, who warns her they need to salvage as much as their wardrobe as they can for Siberia.

This first half of the book, Esther recalls the horrors of this world: the customary division of the healthy and weak, so that Esther, her parents, and her grandmother are separated from her grandfather; the nightmarish two month train journey with nothing more than watery soup (and an occasional meal of bread and cheese from one of the shops at the train stations they sometimes stop to refuel); the disorienting arrival in the camp; and the backbreaking work in a gypsum mine that they are forced to do.

Besides the hardships of Siberia, other horrid news comes, first that Esther's paternal grandfather was transported to a logging camp in another part of the country where he soon fell ill. His problems are overlooked, not losing sight of the "big picture", as "there were trees that needed to be cut down", and he soon died from pneumonia and bronchitis.