Between Shades of Gray

Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys’ debut novel is not to be missed. It’s been pub­lished as a young adult novel, but it is a novel for all ages and a story whose telling is long overdue. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are the Baltic states, those coastal coun­tries that lie along the Baltic Sea between Poland and Finland. You can find them in any atlas up through 1939–1945, but had you looked at an atlas in 1955, those coun­tries would be missing. In their place were Soviet borders along that same location between Poland and Finland.

How does a country dis­appear? That is the story that Sepetys tells in the person of fifteen year-​​old Lina Vilkas who begins the telling: “They took me in my nightgown.” It was June 1941 and Lithuania had been under Soviet occu­pation since 1939. Lina was not Jewish, but she was the daughter of a uni­versity pres­ident. In 1941 the Soviet NKVD rounded up doctors, teachers, artists, and all those clas­sified as bour­geois. The men were sep­a­rated from the women and children and all were taken away by trucks and then herded into cattle cars. Their des­ti­na­tions would be as far away as Siberia and the Artic Circle.

Lina was taken with her mother and her younger brother Jonas. They had twenty minutes to gather what they could. Lina, a budding artist who espe­cially admired the emo­tionally charged paintings of Edward Munch, was more con­cerned about packing her drawing mate­rials than her clothing. She left her home forever with only one suitcase and a summer coat worn over her flowered nightgown. At that moment none of the three knew that Kostas Vilkas, husband and father, had already been arrested, but Lina’s mother knew that the family silver and other trea­sures she had earlier sewn into her coat might be nec­essary to keep her children alive before the nightmare would end.

Sepetys draws the reader into the story before page one with two maps. The first map shows the dis­tance Lina traveled. The second map, a timeline, gives a grim reality to Lina’s story, which is told in a voice direct, honest and often heart­breaking. Her tale of sur­vival (not nec­es­sarily all of her family’s) is one of con­stant horror lived in dis­belief of its occur­rence. It is also a story of bravery, romance, art and love. Lina never loses her passion for art. Her emo­tional drawings, created throughout her ordeal, are saved in the lining of her suitcase become a life sus­taining force. 

The details of star­vation, murder, betrayal, and dan­gerous acts of kindness give depth to Lina’s journey of 440 days. It is in the Epi­logue that Lina brings her story to a close back in Lithuania after addi­tional years of impris­onment in Siberia. Lina’s story, and thou­sands upon thou­sands of stories like hers, played out by thou­sands of exiled and imprisoned Lat­vians and Esto­nians, deserves to take its place among the most notable novels of the World War II experience

Available at Amazon​.com | Between Shades of Gray