'Between Shades of Gray' by Ruta Sepetys

Sepetys, Ruta. Between Shades of Gray. New York: Speak, 2011. Print

The publication of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl opened to door to countless narratives of the experiences of Jewish children and adolescents during World War II: The Upstairs Room by Johanna Reiss, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, Yossel by Joe Kubert, and Maus by Art Speigelman. (Maus isn’t strictly about an adolescent, but it’s too well known to leave off the list.)  Yoshiko Uchida’s Journey to Topaz and Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston explore the experiences of Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned by the United States government following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. 

Image from
www.penguin.com

There is another event, even more horrific, yet unknown to the larger world because of the intense secrecy of life behind the Iron Curtain -- the deportation of thousands upon thousands of Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians to Siberian gulags in 1941 after the Soviet Union invaded the Baltic states in 1940.  Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe (1968) describes the forced relocation of her Polish family to Siberia.  Ruta Sepetys’ Between Shades of Gray follows the Vilkas family from their home in Kaunaus, Lithuania to the gulag at Trofimovsk, well north of the Arctic Circle, on the Laptev Sea. 

Lina Vilkas is fifteen years old, living a comfortable middle-class life in Kaunaus.  Her father, Kostas, is the provost of a university.  Lina is a gifted artist, who has just won a coveted place in a summer program Vilnius.  Her life is brutally upended when the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) arrive at their home late at night to arrest the family, giving them only twenty minutes to pack.  Lina’s mother, Elena and brother, Jonas are also arrested.  The whereabouts of Kostas are unknown, but later we discover he’s also been arrested.  Their crimes?  Nothing more than being an educated, middle-class family.  To the Soviets they were “anti-Soviet”, and their presence needed to be uprooted in order to create a new society, loyal to the Soviet Union.  Lina, Elena, and Jonas are sent to a labor camp in Altai Krai, and Kostas is sent to another prison.  Unable to communicate with Kostas, Lina begins to draw pictures that are carefully coded messages, hoping that she will be able to send them to Kostas and he will join them.  Less than a year after arriving at Altai Krai, Lina, Elena, and Jonas are sent to the gulag in Trofimovsk, along with many other Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Finns.  Forced to work in inhumane conditions, each day is a fight for survival that many ultimately lose.

The conditions are terrible.  The prisoners are given inadequate shelter or forced to make their own with primitive tools and few resources.  They are starved, crammed into cattle cars for the weeks-long journey to Siberia.  Once in the gulags, there are no medicines.  The prisoners do not have the clothes or shoes to endure the harsh Siberian winter.  The only food they have is what the guards deign to give them in exchange for their work, generally a small portion of bread that isn’t enough to keep a mouse alive.  They scrounge for food, but must hide it, lest the guards find out and punish them.  Disease runs rampant: scurvy, dysentery, and malnutrition kill indiscriminately.  The prisoners are covered with lice and other vermin, which also spreads typhus.  Near the end of the winter in Trofimovsk, a Dr. Samodurov comes to inspect the gulags, refusing to report that all is well, and demands that the guards properly feed the prisoners.  At this point, Elena has died and Kostas is reported to have been killed in prison.  Jonas is alive, but barely and Lina is hanging on by her fingernails.

Between Shades of Gray examines a little-known event through “a personal miniature portrait of a teenage girl” (Janoskova 278).  It’s not intended to present a representative portrait of the Baltic deportations, but illuminate a hidden bit of history that remained shrouded in secrecy for more than fifty years until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  A year after Stalin invaded the Baltic states, he ordered the systematic removal of their educated population: teachers, librarians, professors, lawyers, artists, other intellectuals, and even members of the military.  In an interview with School Library Journal, Sepetys stated, “Stalin considered… [them] as a threat, and he was essentially going to get rid of them” (Margolis 22).  Most of the Baltic prisoners stayed in the gulags for twelve years.  When Stalin died, they were released and allowed to return home.  Survivors were unable to speak openly of their experiences then, and “Even now, more than two decades after the end of Soviet occupation, [they] exhibited great fear in opening up to Sepetys” (Roper 20).  For years, to speak “about their experience meant immediate imprisonment or deportation back to Siberia.  As a result, the horrors they endured went dormant” (Sepetys 340).  In an author’s note at the end of the novel, Sepetys writes Stalin killed more than twenty million people through his purges and the Baltics lost “more than a third of their population” (341).  The Baltic deportations to Siberia have personal meaning to Sepetys.  Her paternal grandfather escaped Lithuania, but the other members of his family were sent to gulags in Siberia (Roper 20).  Many of the events depicted in the novel are real, taken from the many interviews she did in Lithuania with survivors (Hill, “Does It Matter” 332).  The people in the novel, with the exception of Dr. Lazar Samodurov, are fictional.  The doctor was a real person, and many Lithuanians credit him with saving their lives.

Sepetys writes the novel in first-person from Lina’s point-of-view.  This allows the reader to experience things as they happen and through Lina’s eyes.  This lends the text a great deal of immediacy.  Had Sepetys written this in a third-person voice, it might have thrown up a barrier between the narration and the reader, effectively distancing the reader from the action.  With Lina’s narration, the reader is placed in the same position of the unknown and uncertainty as Lina.  Lina was somewhat sheltered, so the cruelty she experiences at the hands of the NKVD is sharp and revolting.  When Sepetys begins the novel with the Vilkas’ arrests, the lack of background information and exposition -- the hows and whys of the arrest -- leave the reader, like Lina, unsettled and unsure of what is going to happen next.  This makes the story even more compelling, because we’re pulled into events that Lina herself doesn’t completely understand and learn about them at the same time as Lina.  Many times, there is more to a character than first meets Lina’s eyes (Schneider 103).  Sepetys illustrates this with several characters, but the two that are fleshed out the most are Andrius Arvydas, a fellow prisoner, and Nikolai Kretzsky, a Soviet guard. 

Andrius and his mother are passengers in the same cattle car as Lina and her family.  Once they arrive in Altai Krai, Andrius and his mother receive special treatment from the guards, much to Lina’s disgust.  Lina promptly labels them as traitors.  It’s only later that she learns Mrs. Arvydas “prostitutes herself with the officers in order to gain food for her son” that they also share with the other prisoners (Steinberg 170).  Andrius scathingly tells Lina, “they threatened to kill me unless she slept with them.  And if they get tired of her, they still might kill me.  So how would you feel, Lina, if your mother felt she had to prostitute herself to save your life?” (Sepetys 159).  He goes on to ask Lina, “How does my mother feel, lying with the men who murdered her husband?... You have no idea.  You have no idea how much I hate myself for putting my mother through this, how every day I think of ending my life so she can be free.  But instead, my mother and I are using our misfortune to keep others alive” (Sepetys 159).  

Kretzsky often shows kindness to the prisoners, but usually only when the others cannot see him.  When the other guards are present, he tries to mask his kindness behind cruelty.  He often looks the other way when he sees prisoners scavenging for firewood in the guards’ woodpile.  Kretzsky does not agree with the deportations and is just as much a prisoner in Altai Krai and Trofimovsk as the Lithuanians.  Kretzsky was caught in Altai Krai assisting prisoners, and his punishment was an effective exile to Trofimovsk. 

Without exposition to inform the reader of Lina’s life before her imprisonment, Sepetys uses flashbacks, scattered throughout the narrative.  The flashbacks themselves occur at irregular intervals, “Triggered like blasts of memory by random words and situations” (Janoskova 277).  The flashbacks not only establish Lina’s family as firmly middle-class, but exposes Kostas’ political leanings and how much they place the family in danger.  In one flashback, Lina recalls her father’s reaction to a satiric drawing she’s done of Stalin: “What if someone found it in the trash like I did?  A wind could have blown this to the foot of Stalin… You’ve drawn your father and his friends mocking the leader of the Soviet Union! Are there others?” (Sepetys 92).  It serves to contrast the way in which Lina currently carefully conceals messages in her drawings, and hides the actual drawings so they won’t attract unwanted attention against her previous carefree attitude that her actions have little or negligible consequences. 

Sepetys mostly uses straightforward language to describe the bleak situation of Lina and her family.  In the rare instance that she does elevate Lina’s words to something more poetic, it creates a verbal political cartoon, such as when they arrive at the train station outside Kaunaus and Lina describes their deportation as “a rug being lifted and a huge Soviet broom sweeping us under it” (Sepetys 23).  By keeping the prose forthright, and not soaring into flights of literary fancy, Sepetys allows the brutality and cruelty of the situation to speak for themselves: “The lice brought typhus.  The repeater fell ill… Four days later, I saw his naked body, eyes wide open, stacked in a heap of corpses.  His frostbitten hand was missing.  White foxes had eaten into his stomach, exposing his innards and staining the snow with blood” (309).  It almost feels that if Sepetys had used more poetic language it might have cheapened the experience by trying to take the edge off the conditions.  It’s a spare and unflinching depiction of the conditions of the gulags and embellishment is unnecessary. 

The book ends with an epilogue that reveals the fate of Lina and Jonas.  It feels tacked-on and “answers certain questions too neatly” (Janoskova 278).   It brings up far more questions than it answers, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if the questions were philosophical in nature, but they’re related to the plot.  How did Lina and Jonas get back to Lithuania?  How were they able to survive the conditions in the northern Siberian gulag?  Why were they released?  I wish Sepetys had addressed these questions in the epilogue, rather than this insufficient tying of loose ends.  Its brevity is extremely anti-climactic and disappointing.  It’s at odds with the rest of the novel that exposed the treatment of the Lithuanians so clearly.  That being said, the ending of the book would have been much more satisfying and effective if we’d been left in the dark about Lina and Jonas.  I was pushed into doing my own brief research into the Lithuanian deportations and gulags in general, and learning something new is always a good thing.  I also wonder, since art is such a huge part of the story, if it would have added to the book to illustrate it in the manner of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, with drawings here and there that contribute to the overall tone of the novel without turning it into a full-fledged graphic novel. 

The book itself is somewhat emotionally difficult to read.  The ruthlessness of the gulags is unremitting and there is little respite in the novel.  Another thing that makes the book difficult to digest is the lack of background information.  I wouldn’t want to offer this book as an option in a class reading or whole-class reading without having information about the Lithuania deportations available to read either before or immediately after reading Between Shades of Gray.  The book also brings up questions of the culpability of the United States and Great Britain in the deportations.  The Soviet Union was able to effectively use the chaos of World War II and the United States’ isolationist tendencies to take over three independent countries and effectively get rid of a large portion of their populations.  Furthermore, the book also brings up questions of how the war made strange bedfellows of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. 

The book would make an excellent addition to a class reading list about World War II or genocides in general.  It’s a welcome voice in a field that’s dominated by the narrative of Nazi Germany and provides a different experience of World War II.  It would make an excellent companion novel to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, to put a human face on the totalitarian society portrayed in Orwell’s novel. 

As a piece of historical fiction, Between Shades of Gray is well-researched and it shows in the details Sepetys adds to the novel.  She not only interviewed her family members who had been in the gulags, but other gulag survivors and Lithuanian historians; participated in a re-enactment of the gulag; and visited many of the prisons in Siberia (Hill, “Authenticity” 445; Hill, “Does It Matter” 332; Margolis 22; Roper 20).   Many of the real-life details Sepetys heard in the interviews found their way into the novel (Hill, “Does It Matter” 332).  Sepetys has also said that she felt an immense responsibility to history and her ancestry to tell the story as accurately as possible (Roper 20).  It all comes together in an authentic story of a long-ignored period of history.

Did I enjoy the book?  Insomuch as the book served its purpose: to provide a window into a historical period, then yes, I did.  I’m not sure you could say a book about something so awful is “enjoyable”.  It is a compelling read?  Absolutely.  I had a hard time putting it down once I started reading.  It’s the kind of book that lingers with you long after you close the book, making you question yet again how a person can view another human being as something less than human. 

***********************************************

Works Cited

Hill, Rebecca A. "The Color of Authenticity in Multicultural Children's Literature." Voice of Youth Advocates 34.5 (2011): 445-7. Education Source. Web. 14 July 2014.

Hill, Rebecca. "Does it Matter Where You Come from?" Voice of Youth Advocates 34.4 (2011): 332-3. Education Source. Web. 14 July 2014.

Janoskova, Eva. "Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys." Use of English 63.3 (2012): 277-8. Education Source. Web. 14 July 2014.

Margolis, Rick. "Super Sad Love Story." School Library Journal 57.3 (2011): 22-. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 July 2014.

Roper, Ingrid. "YA Novel Unearths Lost Chapter in History." Publishers Weekly 258.9 (2011): 20-. Education Source. Web. 14 July 2014.

Schneider, Dean. "Between Shades of Gray." Horn Book Magazine 87.3 (2011): 103-. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 July 2014.

Sepetys, Ruta. Between Shades of Gray. New York: Speak, 2011. Print.

Steinberg, Renee. "Between Shades of Gray." School Library Journal 57.3 (2011): 170-. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 July 2014.