Between Shades of Gray

by Ruta Sepetys

You stand for what is right, Lina, without the expectation of gratitude or reward.

It was the last time I would look into a real mirror for more than a decade.

I pictured a rug being lifted and a huge Soviet broom sweeping us under it.

Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.

would they believe they were really thieves and prostitutes? I felt as if I were riding a pendulum. Just as I would swing into the abyss of hopelessness, the pendulum would swing back with some small goodness.

“Munch is primarily a lyric poet in color. He feels colors, but does not see them. Instead, he sees sorrow, crying, and withering.”

Sorrow, crying, and withering. I saw that in Ashes, too. I thought it was brilliant.

‘From my rotting body flowers shall grow, and I am in them and that is eternity.’ Isn’t that beautiful?”

Was it harder to die, or harder to be the one who survived? I was sixteen, an orphan in Siberia, but I knew. It was the one thing I never questioned. I wanted to live.

A tiny sliver of gold appeared between shades of gray on the horizon. I stared at the amber band of sunlight, smiling. The sun had returned.

The returning deportees were treated as criminals. They were forced to live in restricted areas, and were under constant surveillance by the KGB, formerly the NKVD.

Speaking about their experience meant immediate imprisonment or deportation back to Siberia.

Brave souls, who feared the truth might be lost forever, buried journals and drawings on Baltic soil, risking death if their capsules were discovered by the KGB.

Josef Stalin killed more than twenty million people during his reign of terror. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia lost more than

third of their population during the Soviet annihilation.

In 1991, after fifty years of brutal occupation, the three Baltic countries regained their independence, peacefully and with dignity.

They chose hope over hate and showed the world that even through the darkest night, there is light.