It's June 1941, and talented artist Lina has just been accepted to a very prestigious art school in Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania. But when the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, knocks on her family's door in the middle of the night, her entire world is destroyed in an instant.Told to be ready to leave in 20 minutes, Lina, her little brother Jonas, and her mother are shoved into a truck with other Lithuanians who are just as confused and terrified as they are. Lina is also desperate to know what has happened to her Papa - a provost at the university, he never returned home from work that evening. Lina, her family, and the other prisoners are taken to the train station and packed into a filthy cattle car. After two days in the dark with no food or water, the train begins to move. The last thing Lina glimpses before it pulls out of the station is a priest - issuing last rites to the people in the train cars.
For six weeks, Lina, her family and the other prisoners are taken east, out of Lithuania and through Russia. Stopping only once a day for the NKVD to remove the dead from the cars, they are forced to survive on what little food they managed to smuggle aboard. When the train finally stops, they are in Siberia - deported as slaves, political prisoners sentenced to hard labor on a farm commune for the crime of being Lithuanian.
As Lina fights to survive the horrors of near-starvation, the brutal cold and conditions of Siberia with little clothing or shelter, grueling physical labor (the prisoners are forced to dig holes using only garden trowels with the handles sawed off), and abuse from the NKVD, she does everything in her power to keep her mother and Jonas safe and alive. She also tries to keep hope alive - using her art to make a record of what is happening to them and smuggling her drawings out of the camp in the hopes they will make it to her father someday. Lina knows the Soviets are trying to erase her, her family, her people and her culture - and the only way to defeat them is to stay alive.
This powerful historical novel tells the true story of Stalin's ethnic cleansing of the Baltic states during World War II. When the Soviet Union occupied and absorbed Lithuana, Estonia and Latvia, they deported, murdered, and enslaved thousands of people who were considered anti-Soviet at the same time Hitler was perpetrating the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. The daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, author Ruta Sepetys has brought to life the amazing strength, tenacity, and determination to survive of the Lithuanian people in the face of almost hopeless adversity. Shades of Gray is not to be missed by readers of historical fiction - check it out @ the library!
Megan
(Now reading Where She Went by Gayle Forman, the sequel to If I Stay - and wow. Just wow. Love love love!)