The Rudomins move to barracks close to the village, and Esther’s parents are assigned jobs. Esther longs to live close to Rubtsovsk, and her wish comes true when the Polish deportees are informed that they have been granted amnesty. One Sunday, Esther and Grandmother are allowed to walk from the gypsum mine to the village market. Esther and her family are assigned to a gypsum mine, where they live in a barracks are forced to do manual labor. After a journey of several weeks in the cramped cattle car, the train passengers arrive in Rubtsovsk, a Siberian village. Arriving at a train station, they are assigned to cattle cars, and Esther’s grandfather is separated from the rest of the family. Esther’s predictable world is interrupted when Esther, her parents, and her paternal grandparents are arrested by Russian soldiers and labeled enemies of the state. The narrator is Esther Rudomin, a 10-year-old Jewish girl raised in a close-knit, upper-middle-class family. The setting of the book is June 1941, in the Polish city of Vilna. The page numbers in this guide correspond to the 2018 revised paperback edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books.
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