Exactly a year before, the Soviets have begun moving troops over the borders into the country. Then, in August, Lithuania was officially annexed into the Soviet Union. When I complained at the dinner table, Papa yelled at me and told me to never, ever say anything derogatory about the Soviets. He sent me to my room. I didn’t say anything out loud after that. But I thought about it a lot.

Despite her father’s caution, 15-year-old Lena Vilkas, her 10-year-old brother Jonas and their mother Elena are charged as criminals and arrested in their home in Lithuania by Soviet officers. Lena’s Papa didn’t return from work the previous day and they don’t even know if he’s alive. The three of them are forced into a train car with forty-six other people, mostly women and children. Among them are Ona and her newborn baby, taken from the hospital just as soon as the umbilical cord was cut, Miss. Grybas, a perfectly harmless spinster teacher, a mean bald man, supposedly a stamp collector, Mrs. Arvydas, wife of a murdered Lithuanian officer, and her 17-year-old son Andrius, who has to pretend to be feeble-minded in order to stay with his mother. Needless to say, they are all treated like cattle.

After spending more than 8 weeks in the train car with only two buckets of water and a bucket of food a day for all of them, they arrive to a beet farm where they’re expected to work all day, most of them digging in frozen ground with hand shovels and bare hands. For months they have nothing but hunger and disease in labor camp, and just when they think things couldn’t possibly get any worse, they get moved to Siberia - supposedly to build a factory, but in reality, they’re just expected to die.

Lena’s story is powerful for many reasons. Of course none of us can stay indifferent to a story about so much suffering and Ruta Sepetys chose a very smart way to tell it. Her writing is very matter of fact, her sentences are short and to the point. She allowed herself very little emotion, thus giving the reader a chance to fill in the gaps. I think it was the only way to tell such a horrendous story without overdoing it.

When I finished this book last night, I was completely grief-stricken. I thought: “What am I supposed to do now? Am I supposed to just stand up and walk around like I didn’t just take a long, hard look at the ugliest side of humanity?” For the first time in my life, I felt that my education has failed me. How is it possible that we just went around all this, barely mentioning it? We dedicated so much time to Hitler and his victims (and we should have), but we’re talking about 20 million people here! 20 million people they just omitted to tell us about. I’m not saying I was completely clueless about it all, far from it, but I was never really confronted with it. And I absolutely needed to be.

I think everyone should read Between Shades of Gray. Saying that it will help you appreciate the little things sounds like a horrible cliché, but it’s also undeniably true. Just get ready to be crushed into pieces by all the atrocities and suffering this relatively short book describes.