Surviving on hope

Between Shades of Gray

Most of the western world thinks about Second World War being one fought against Nazi Germany. Even popular stories such as Schindler’s Ark do much to remind us of the oppression of Jews, but obscure the persecution of the Baltic States and the arrest and removal of their middle classes by Stalin.

Fifteen percent of the Lithuanian population perished between 1939 and 1945 with similar proportions of Estonians and Latvians slaughtered. The all-smiles photograph of Stalin with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta in 1943 hid the bleak reality behind the Soviet Union’s own final solution.

Doctors, librarians, lawyers, teachers and members of the military were removed from their homes, separated by gender with no regard for family and were compacted into train carriages and transported to labour camps strewn across Russia.

The pact of non-aggression between Stalin and Hitler in 1939, and broken by Hitler when he invaded Russia a year later, meant that Stalin could carry out his own form of ethnic cleansing by the displacement of so-called fascists and enact his communist ideal of proletariat power.

The chapters are short but the journey is long in this Lithuanian tragedy that starts in Vilnius with the violent separation of a family, and runs across the Urals into the Siberian labour camps with all the degradation you can imagine.

Ruta Sepetys is an American and so is her father, but when she heard about the experience of her grandparents’ generation she decided to research this novel with a trip to Lithuania and spent some time in a barren railway carriage that had transported people from Vilnius to Omsk and on through to arctic Siberia.

She visited labour camps where women and children were abused by the NKVD, the police known for their activities in the Gulag system of deportation and forced labour. Her main character is Lina, a young girl who is also an accomplished artist and who keeps her own spirit alive by creating ugly cartoons of her captors and illustrating the rooms from the home she has left behind.

She loves a boy she hardly knows and who she must leave behind on a beet farm, while she is forced to travel up to the arctic north coast of the Laptev Sea with her stalwart mother and siblings.

There may be only so much you can take of sweat, blood, urine, scurvy, lice, freezing wasteland, cruelty, deprivation and death.

You may need to man up but, if you’re up for it, this is a remarkable document of Stalin’s persecution of innocent civilians and how the human condition can still survive on hope.