Angela M is taking a break.'s Reviews > Between Shades of Gray
Between Shades of Gray
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I was so taken by the story of Lina and her family and all of the others that came to life here as they were deported from their homes in Lithuania, by Stalin's Russians to a work camp in Siberia. It's a devastatingly sad story of fictional characters but what makes it even more heartbreaking is that this story reflects a true story of a genocide that took the lives of over 20 million people . I am especially saddened by the fact that I knew pretty much nothing about it and I am grateful to the author for telling it. It's so hard to imagine that this is a piece of history that is so little known and I can't help but think - how can that be?
This is a remarkable story for so many reasons . It's categorized as YA and it is simply and well written in short chapters but by no means does it lighten the load of what happened here . I would say that this should not be missed by any adult who thinks this will be a light depiction of the horrific events . I fell in love with these characters - Lina , and her mother, and her brother Jonas and we see so much of their father through Lina's flashbacks and of course wonderful Andrius. I was struck by the real dichotomy between what was happening to them and the happy, beautiful life they had before which is depicted in Lina's flashbacks - the comfort , joy and beauty vs the vile conditions, sadness , ugliness and death . What remains constant is Lina's passion for her art , a sign of her hope.
I am grateful to Ruta Sepetys for giving me this story and enlightening me to the horrors that occurred because in doing so she has also given a glimpse at the strength of a people that allowed for hope and the ability to see "A tiny sliver of gold...between shades of gray on the horizon."
I am also grateful to my GR friend Tracey who waited patiently to discuss the book as I was behind in starting on our planned date
This is a remarkable story for so many reasons . It's categorized as YA and it is simply and well written in short chapters but by no means does it lighten the load of what happened here . I would say that this should not be missed by any adult who thinks this will be a light depiction of the horrific events . I fell in love with these characters - Lina , and her mother, and her brother Jonas and we see so much of their father through Lina's flashbacks and of course wonderful Andrius. I was struck by the real dichotomy between what was happening to them and the happy, beautiful life they had before which is depicted in Lina's flashbacks - the comfort , joy and beauty vs the vile conditions, sadness , ugliness and death . What remains constant is Lina's passion for her art , a sign of her hope.
I am grateful to Ruta Sepetys for giving me this story and enlightening me to the horrors that occurred because in doing so she has also given a glimpse at the strength of a people that allowed for hope and the ability to see "A tiny sliver of gold...between shades of gray on the horizon."
I am also grateful to my GR friend Tracey who waited patiently to discuss the book as I was behind in starting on our planned date
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Feb 04, 2016 05:01PM
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Sure, 20 million (mainly) innocent lives. Just that the Baltic countries were not the only ones affected. For my people (people who share my ethnicity but were living in the USSR) the arrests and deportations started already in 1929 and people were executed en masse in 1937-38, so what happened in the Baltic countries was nothing new. And of course there had been forced labour camps in the Soviet Union since 1918 and people were being arrested for made up reasons. In Ukraine the organised famine killed millions in the early 1930's. Luckily we were able to defend our country against the Soviet invasion in 1939 and for the second time in 1944, so we were spared from the occupation and annexation, and the ethnic cleansing.
Yeah, for some reason it has been forgotten, or maybe ignored. Probably because Stalin was one of the Allies and those fighting against him were automatically on the "wrong" side. Victors write the history. Churchill and Roosevelt even helped to hide the fact that it was the Soviets who were responsible for the Katyn massacre (the execution of tens of thousands of Polish POWs in 1940) by blaming the Nazis, even though they had received reports and knew the truth.
Anyway, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 is the most famous book about the forced labour camps and In the Clutches of the Tcheka (https://archive.org/details/1929InThe...) is one of the earliest memoirs, published in English in 1929. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP9p9... is an Estonian documentary with subtitles about Estonian and Finnish women and girls during the war if you are interested.
This article might be interesting, too: http://www.jewishquarterly.org/issuea... (Some minor details are not quite accurate.) WWII becomes more complicated if you know that there was a front synagogue for the Jewish soldiers and officers a couple of miles from the German troops and of course German soldiers even had to salute to the higher ranking Jewish officers with whom they were fighting against the common enemy.
Angela, I think Diane(?) may have read this books as well. Anyway, it's already on my tbr but most definitely would have been added after reading your review. You told us just enough to whet the appetite for those of us who enjoy a good story based on true historical facts.
Connie , thank you . I'm looking forward to her new one also .
Bette, yes , sad but true .
had something to with fifty shades
of grey.
had something to with fifty shades
of grey."
That's what has been happening to many of us, Gail:)
But what bothers me about this book, is that Sepetys claims that the deportations have been a secret and people haven't been allowed to talk about them. Sure, it might have been true in the Baltic countries during the occupation but almost everyone knew about them anyway because they had experienced it, and the rest of the world didn't really care or didn't even know those countries had existed. And when Ingrians were being deported in the early 1930's, it didn't really interest the world, either, or the Ukrainian Holodomor. (Sofi Oksanen has won prizes for her novel Purge and her other novel When the Doves Disappeared is also about those times. There must be others that I don't know about.)
Whereas in Finland it has been common knowledge for decades and probably taught in schools since the war. And people have written about it, like this study Surviving the Soviet Meat Grinder: The Politics of Finnish Gulag Memoirs shows ("more than thirty memoirs have been published from the early 1920s to the late 1990s"). So there has always been information available on the Western side of the Iron Curtain. Often the authors of those memoirs have mentioned that there have been people from 40 or 50 different nationalities at the same camp. One Finn met an old friend of Alexandra Tolstaya (Leo Tolstoy's daughter), Prince Obolensky, and when he was dying he asked the Finn (if he ever got out) to give her his only possession, a wooden spoon, and later the story of that spoon was also told in the US in "This is your Life" program about her. The book I am reading this was published in 1957, the author had spent the years 1945-54 in Soviet prisons, in Gulag and exiled in Siberia. (He was one of the men that the Finnish communist Minister of Interior handed over to the Allied Control Commission, illegally of course. Those afterwar years are often called "Years of Peril" because of the ACC being in the country and that minister in office, as there was a fear of a communist takeover.)
The same tendency to skip over things can be noticed also in many documentaries about WWII. From the German Blitzkrieg over Poland they jump to the French occupation, ignoring the Soviet invasion of Poland two weeks later and also that they forced the Baltic countries to accept military bases which eventually lead to their occupation and annexation (Bessarabia was occupied, too) and of course the Winter War. As a result the Soviet Union looks like a victim and gets to behave like one when Germany starts the Operation Barbarossa because the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol are never mentioned. I recently watched a documentary about the Siege of Leningrad and in it one woman said that they thought the war was far away and wouldn't reach them. I just thought that I guess she missed the war that they started which was fought maybe only about 50-100 km from Leningrad only a year earlier... (Oh, it was also the war that gave the name to the Molotov cocktails. Apparently Molotov had said in radio that they weren't bombing Finland, just dropping bread baskets to the starving people. So bombs were named Molotov breadbaskets and the improvised antitank weapon used by Finns got the name Molotov cocktail.)
So it's not really surprising if you haven't heard about the Baltic deportations, if you haven't, for example, heard of the Winter War, either, which WAS an actual war and widely reported at the time (a nation of 3.7 million holding her own against the Soviet Union) as they are all connected. Sometimes I have even heard claimed that the Winter War wasn't a part of WWII because it wasn't fought between "Axis" and "Allies", but obviously its origin was in the Pact, just like that of the occupation of Poland, though Stalin had been pressuring Finland and making demands since 1938. So yeah, WWII looks a lot different from the point-of-view of Eastern Europeans. Oh, and sorry about writing an essay...
This article was written in 1996, I doubt new information has been found much since: http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/arti... NKVD was also funny that way that they didn't care who they took, they had only been given quotas by Stalin & co., this many from that area is to be deported and that many shot. If the person they were looking for wasn't at home, they just took their neighbour. It didn't matter as long as the quotas were filled.
The problem also is that the Soviet version of the history has been considered the right one (and even more often the Allied one where Finland was also the enemy, UK did declare a war against us after all). It took a long time (late 1980's) for them to admit that they had orchestrated the "Mainila shots" that gave them the excuse to invade Finland. Another example is the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn that for Russians in Estonia (those who moved there during the occupation) is the symbol of liberating Estonia from the Nazis (yeah, right), but for Estonians it's the symbol of the Soviet oppression. I've heard it's nickname is "The Unknown Rapist". (The Red Army soldiers raped even Russian women who were concentration camp survivors, so one can guess what happened to the others.) And in 2007 the Russians rioted because Estonians wanted to (and did) move it elsewhere from the town center and of course that gave them a "reason" to call Estonians Nazi sympathisers, or fascists or something. We are kind of used to it by now, though, we already know the truth so it doesn't bother us. If you have to choose between two evils, it's pretty normal to choose the one who is NOT currently killing (or previously killed) your people, if only to buy time. So in a way WWII is still being fought in the history writing and how it is interpreted.
Some American sites even claim that Finland declared war on Germany in March 1945 and became a part of the Allies. I really don't know where they get that but nothing like it never happened. The Finnish government just mentioned in the minutes of their meeting (just before the elections so they were documenting it for the posterity) that Finland had been in a state of war with Germany since the fall. I guess no one has bothered to check that from a Finnish historian. Americans didn't even understand the plot behind the Ryti-Ribbentrop Pact. Because Finland was a democracy, anything just signed by the president didn't bind the country (and Ryti was an anglophile lawyer). So he sacrificed himself in order to get much needed help for his country and when the Soviet attacks were halted, he resigned, and Mannerheim took office. (A clip of him taking office, looks pretty good for a 77-year-old after almost 5 years of war: https://youtu.be/kBq45BDSDEg?t=2m10s) http://www.history.com/this-day-in-hi... Try finding any info about the last sentence on any Finnish source... Finland didn't capitulate, either, it was very important for the country and Finns had again fought the Soviets to a standstill and the army was stronger than ever, or almost at least. You don't capitulate then. (Sorry, the false representation of history makes me mad.)
Also it's good to remember that Finns had already fought an extremely bloody civil war in 1918 that started with the Red Terror between the bourgeois Whites of the Finnish Senate, supported by Germany, and the Russian backed bolshevik Reds. (Finland was probably the most democratic country in the world at the time, all men and women of age had had the right to vote and to be elected since 1906, so...) Estonians had their Independence War in 1919 against the Soviet Russia, and Latvians and Lithuanians (and Poland) had somewhat similar but even more complicated wars, too, so there already were bad memories in recent history. Actually the Finnish resistance against the Russification had already started in 1899, so it's always been there. I even live only a 5-minute walk away from the place where Lenin and Stalin met for the first time in 1905. At that time they and the Finns were both against the Tsarist Russia. The grandfather of one of our most well known politicians and ministers was a personal friend of Lenin's, although it's his grandmother who is more famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella_W..., a film based on her play even won an Oscar. (She is also mentioned in Professor Martens' Departure by Jaan Kroos, an Estonian author and a Gulag survivor. I haven't read it but can probably recommend it.) But of course paradoxically our maybe greatest hero, if we have those, is a man who served 30 years in the Imperial Russian Army Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy. So yeah, there is a very long and complicated history between the countries that has even separated families to different sides and to fully understand it one has to put themselves to their/our shoes. It's also full of "realpolitik", as idealism doesn't really work here, it's a luxury we haven't been able to afford.