A bestseller on the New York Times list and recipient of numerous literary awards, Ruta Sepetys’ novel Between Shades of Gray offers readers a chance to explore the meaning of life, preserving inner freedom in a threatening environment, moral choices, and the strength of the human spirit.
Viktor Frankl’s renowned book Man’s Search for Meaning, written in 1946, immediately gained international recognition and continues to be reprinted to this day.
Stories of deportation based on nationality and survival in Soviet death camps could not be openly published until the 1990s. Not only were books forbidden, but even oral accounts posed dangers to both speakers and listeners. Society treated survivors who returned as criminals and traitors. How could a victim of occupation betray the occupier?!
Between Shades of Gray is the story of Lina, a future artist, told from her perspective. At the beginning of the book, she is fifteen. Her family is intellectual—her father is the vice rector of Kaunas University. Her greatest desire is to become an artist; her greatest fear is not being accepted into the summer program to study with “the most gifted artists of Northern Europe.” The most terrifying distance is to Vilnius, because “Vilnius is only a few hours’ drive from Kaunas.” Soviet occupation is incomprehensible and unjust, something that cannot last. But then June 14, 1941, arrives. A knock at the door. Twenty minutes to gather belongings. In a nightgown with a coat thrown over it, Lina, her mother, and her brother (their father had been arrested earlier) begin a journey—from a life with a future in Kaunas to a death camp on the shores of the Laptev Sea.
From a psychological perspective, the novel’s characters experience a series of psychological phenomena typical of sudden, life-altering shocks. At the same time, the protagonist goes through the natural stages of growing up.
The characters react to the arrest and the artificially created time crunch based on their life experience and their ability to see and analyze reality. Ten-year-old Jonas initially runs excitedly around the room, wasting precious minutes of the twenty they were given. Then he dresses as if for school—a suit, a white shirt, a schoolbag. Fifteen-year-old Lina feels dizzy but tries to compose herself and pulls out a suitcase. However, she cannot focus on what to pack. Her mother, after briefly losing her composure at the sight of her son, immediately recovers and begins giving the children specific instructions on what to do—exactly as social psychology experts recommend. In dangerous situations where help is needed, instead of shouting “Help!” or “Quickly!” one should address a specific person with a clear instruction.
Looking back on that night, Lina recalls that there had indeed been signs. She had noticed but not given them much thought—her parents whispering, her mother sewing something into the lining of her coat, her father coming home late at night. The adults, having analyzed the reality around them, were preparing the family for an escape from the country. Thanks to this, her mother was ready when the knock came at the door.
Another stress factor for the protagonist is the encounter with people entirely different from those she was used to. The first of these is an officer who shouts at her mother, accusing her of damaging state property. She had dared to smash her porcelain dishes: “Mom,” Lina asked, “why did you smash those beautiful things?” Her mother looked at them and replied, “Because I love them!” When Elena Vilkene tries to adjust her hat in front of a mirror, the NKVD officer is so enraged that he shoves her with his rifle butt. The officer’s cultural and moral “baggage” prevents him from understanding why an intelligent middle-aged woman would bother to adjust her hat before being taken away to her death. It’s as if Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov (from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog) genuinely couldn’t grasp the necessity of table manners that Professor Preobrazhensky tried to instill in him. The author adds a final touch that highlights the chasm between the worldviews of the characters and the end of Lina’s familiar life: tossing a cigarette butt onto the clean floor of the living room and grinding it into the wood with her boot. “The same could happen to us,” she thinks.
After this, acute stress gradually transitions into a chronic stage. The shock state, acting like anesthesia, allows Lina to maintain her sanity. While being transported in a cattle car, she sees and experiences things she never could have imagined. Even a vivid imagination is limited by one’s own experience.
Anesthesia cannot last forever. Psychological defenses have their limits. Lina has a nervous breakdown. She doesn’t scream or throw a tantrum. One day, as she steps out of the car to fetch a bucket of gruel, she realizes she cannot return “inside.” She doesn’t care that the allotted time is running out. She doesn’t care that they might shoot her. She even ignores her mother’s pleas: “Lina, come back.” It is indifference that saves her. A drunken NKVD officer simply throws her back into the car.
For a person recovering from a psychological breakdown, the reaction of those around them is crucial. Her mother doesn’t scold Lina or tell her how frightened she was for her. When Lina confesses she wanted to run away, Elena calmly responds that she understands her daughter’s feelings. In this way, the girl receives recognition of her emotions from another person.
After this conversation, Lina no longer needs anesthesia. She can see reality for what it is.
In the reality surrounding the protagonist, the new authorities have an enemy they fear greatly and seek to destroy: education, intelligence, and humanistic values—everything that in a totalitarian and criminalized society is considered weakness and shame. The people with Lina in the cattle cars were placed there based on “lists.” And these “lists” were compiled based on professional and social criteria: doctors, teachers, military personnel, businesspeople, scientists, lawyers—those with a broad worldview, knowledge of human history, and the ability to take responsibility for their own lives. It might seem that in a situation threatening survival, humanistic values could be abandoned. But Lina’s story shows that it is precisely those who preserve their humanistic morality—those who help others—that survive while maintaining their identity. This seems illogical from a resource perspective. When resources are scarce, it would make sense to save them rather than spend them on others. But with moral resources, it’s different: those who share them survive as full human beings, while those who focus only on themselves break down and lose the will to live.
Absolutely strangers help Lina in the death camp, and in doing so, they feel like human beings: “They were happy to have helped someone, even though it brought them no personal benefit. We were trying to touch the heavens from the bottom of the ocean. I understood that if we helped each other, we could rise a little higher.”
External conditions affect everyone in them. The ability to minimize this impact depends on the strength of a person’s “inner core.” It turns out that the strongest core belongs to people in peaceful professions. When prisoners are provoked by impossible demands, when angry shouts echo and gunfire is imminent, it’s not a black-clad ninja bursting through the window to smash the glass and fight off the “bad guys” bare-handed. No, it’s a lawyer imprisoned based on a “list” who calms the hysterical outbursts and explains how to behave. Thanks to this, not a single shot is fired, and the armed men are stunned by the organized and dignified behavior of the “fascist pigs.” In the experience of soldiers, there is no record of how they should behave in a situation where violence is absent. Even a hardened killer needs to justify his actions to himself.
To make their task easier, the oppressors use one of their favorite tools for manipulating human consciousness and behavior: depersonalization. It begins with the idea of “lists,” where people are categorized by professional affiliation. It continues during arrests and never really ends. Personal belongings are taken away. The ability to be alone, to maintain normal human modesty, is stripped away. In the car transporting Lina, men and women are kept together in what is essentially a cattle car. The toilet is a hole in the floor with no partition. The ability to maintain basic hygiene is taken away. The ability to receive information about the outside world is denied. And the final blow comes when, upon exiting the car, a person sees an inscription on its wall: “Thieves and prostitutes.” This inscription is meant to be seen by everyone passing by. It implies that there are no individuals here—just a mass of thieves and prostitutes.
Without information and alternative experiences, myths emerge. “We’ll be home soon. When the rest of the world finds out what the Soviet Union is doing, it will all end,” Lina’s mother believes at the beginning of their imprisonment. Being moved from a forced labor camp to an unknown location sparks wild thoughts of being transported to America.
Depersonalization, besides making the oppressor’s actions easier, aims to force the oppressed to accept this treatment of themselves as just. When the entire environment and conditions tell you that you are garbage, how can you not believe it? What can you rely on?
The author presents several possible supports. These include the consequences of family upbringing (internalized unwritten norms), the presence of an authoritative figure nearby or preserved in memory, and consistently performing actions that are possible under conditions of restricted freedom.
Lina demonstrates adherence to unwritten family norms throughout the narrative. The authoritative figure nearby is her mother; the absent one is her father. When Lina is on the verge of acting like her enemies, her mother’s words stop her: “Think about what your father would say: someone else’s bad deed does not give us the right to do evil in return.” Though her father is no longer alive, it is her mother who speaks these words.
An example of possible actions to preserve human dignity is provided by her mother at the very beginning of their time in the cattle car. Among frightened, disoriented, even aggressively inclined people, she manages to create a corner for the children to change clothes. After all, Lina is in a nightgown, and ten-year-old Jonas, overwhelmed by stress, has wet himself. There is no space in the car. The situation does not lend itself to decency. What is decency when life is falling apart?! Yet Elena Vilkene politely and persistently defends the right to privacy. Temporary though it may be, a corner is made “so the children don’t have to change in front of everyone.”
In the yurt, built “from nothing,” there is no place to hide for relieving oneself. In the blizzard of the polar night, the bucket stands right in the living space. How could there be any privacy here? Intimacy could not survive here. Yet a person could turn away from their fellow inhabitants. This action, which seemingly changes nothing, carries an important message: that the person is aware of what is happening, respects their own and others’ privacy, and tries to protect those around them from seeing what they shouldn’t. They do everything they can within the current conditions to maintain that dignity.
The author, through Lina’s voice, does not name a single representative of the oppressive regime by name or surname. Instead, they are referred to as guards, NKVD officers, or commanders. In this way, she also depersonalizes those on the side of the “shadows.” Where the division into black and white thrives, totalitarianism and disregard for the individual begin. It’s no wonder that when Lina automatically classifies Nikolai Kretzsky as a “monster,” her mother says, “We don’t know what kind of person he is... He’s just a boy.”
For a fifteen-year-old girl, instant judgment is a normal adolescent maximalism. But her mother, embodying maturity and wisdom, sees the differences between this guard and other representatives of Soviet authority. She begins to do what is necessary to truly know another person: she starts talking to Kretzsky. Despite the risk of being rejected, the possibility of being suspected by fellow prisoners of informing, and the risk of losing her children’s trust—since their first reaction to their mother speaking with a guard was horror. Horror and disbelief that their mother would trade herself for their safety!
Under normal circumstances, such a suspicion about one’s own mother would never cross the mind of Lina, who is passionate about painting, or her eleven-year-old brother Jonas. But the influence of the surrounding environment does its work.
Open communication with another person is often risky (primarily in a psychological sense). In the case of Elena Vilkene and the young guard, the risk is justified. What Nikolai Kretzsky carries in his soul has nothing to do with the behavior he displays to those around him. He has his own personal drama, his own goal, which he can only achieve by moving from camp to camp as a guard.
After this conversation, the character named Kretzsky becomes a person. He is given a name. Nikolai is now an individual, not just a gray figure in the shadows.
Another character from the “shadows” also gains a name. The camp doctor who refuses to write a positive report about the camp instead demands improved food rations and warm clothing for the deportees. The author wrote about a real person, Dr. Samodurov, who saved many lives with his intervention. In the book, the characters refer to him as “Dr. Samodurov”—by name and surname.
“Me too,” Nikolai replies when Lina shouts her hatred for him. As much as possible, Kretzsky tries to help, but in his distorted world, actions to be approved and considered correct must be bad and cruel.
The public slap Lina receives from Nikolai and his abusive language actually save her from a group rape by NKVD officers. The order to paint a portrait of the vile commander Ivanov gives the young artist a chance to warm up and work with real pencils and real paper. The mocking tossing of food scraps (payment for the portraitist’s work—food) masks the delivery of normal rations. Though Lina has to endure a broken face (hit by a can of preserves) and the laughter of the satisfied guards enjoying their entertainment.
It is often said that a person always has a choice in how to act. The guards have that choice too. One might say they were simply diligently following orders and genuinely believed in the righteousness of the regime they served. But even in the order about the daily food ration (300 grams of bread in the Arctic conditions of hard labor!), there is no clause stating that a guard has the right to take a prisoner’s ration just for entertainment. That is exactly what Commander Ivanov loves to do.
Choices are not made in a vacuum but from certain starting positions. For the characters, these are the moral values closest to them. The influence of the environment and unwritten norms is significant. The stronger a person’s inner core, the more likely they are to resist external influence and make a more independent choice.
The representatives of the shadows also exist in an unfavorable environment: harsh natural conditions, prisoners who hate the guards, colleagues who consider displays of humanism weakness or betrayal. The main moral value for them is the recognition of the right of the strong.
Perhaps in a different environment with different unwritten norms, the guards (except for the outright sadists) would consider dignified treatment of prisoners socially acceptable and even take pride in their correctness rather than their sadism.
“We don’t know what kind of person he is,” this psychologically precise warning should resonate like a refrain throughout the book. Lina considered Ulushka, the mistress of the house in an Altai collective farm where deportees were forced to work, repulsive. Indeed, she demanded extra payment for lodging, ate in front of their hungry eyes, and demanded that sick Jonas be thrown out of the house. But when she heard the news that they were being sent away by train, she tearfully shoved the food she had into her mother’s hands. It was this food that saved the family from death during the journey.
The acquaintances from the cattle car—the mother and son who collaborated with the NKVD—arouse Lina’s contempt and scorn. Only later does she learn that the mother pays with her own life for her son’s survival. Otherwise, he would have been killed. And the son passes food to the prisoners, including those who are sick and cannot work—since the sick do not receive rations.
From adolescent maximalism to an adult perspective: this is the journey Lina takes while her peers are still lost in youthful dreams. She matures enough to ask Nikolai for forgiveness. She finds the strength to resist, preserve herself, and help others over a long period. In 1954, after returning from Siberia with her brother, Lina tells of her experiences in notes she buries in the ground.
In her appeal to future readers, she does not call for vengeance. Remaining true to her moral principles, Lina Arvidene expresses hope that her story will awaken the “deepest source of human compassion” and inspire someone to speak out so that such evil never happens again.
