Between Shades of Gray

Between Shades of Gray is a fictionalized account of what happened to many Lithuanians—and others from Estonia and Latvia—after the Soviet Union annexed and occupied the Baltic States in 1940. Thousands of citizens of these countries were deported and imprisoned, and many of them ended up in Siberian forced labor camps like the ones Lina Vilkas and her mother and brother are sent to in the book. The novel is told from the first-person perspective of a fifteen-year-old artist, Lina, and begins with the dramatic statement, “They took me in my nightgown” (24). It chronicles her family’s arrest by the Soviet police and their journey from Kaunaus in Lithuania to Trofimovsk, near the North Pole, a journey that takes over a year and ends with their imprisonment at the North Pole for over a decade.

The book is divided into three sections: “thieves and prostitutes” describes the weeks of travel from Kaunaus to the first forced labor camp they stay at—a beet farm in the Altai region of Siberia; “maps and snakes” details the Vilkas’s life at the Altai labor camp; and “ice and ashes,” which is an account of Lina and her family’s journey to the Trofimovsk camp above the Arctic Circle, where they learn of Lina’s father’s execution in Krasnoyarsk prison and where her mother finally dies of grief and starvation.