I will never be able to recommend this book enough. It has been on my Goodreads to-read shelf since ages, but then I've stumbled across it in this German bookshop. I really liked the cover, so it caught my attention. Eventually, I found out it was the German edition of Between Shades of Gray. Which so happened to end up as my favourite book.
Author: Ruta Šepetys
Title: Between Shades of Gray
Published: 22nd March 2011
Pages: 344
Price: £3.95
Publisher: Philomel Books
Rate: 5 out of 5
“Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother's was worth a pocket watch.”
History can tell many stories. It may also forget some. Should we look into history books, we probably won't be able to find a mention of Lithuanian people and their deportation. And why is that? Simply because the victims were not allowed to speak of any of those terrible things that happened to them. All their stories and memories have often been put into a special container and buried in gardens or fields in a hope that someone would find it and listen to their cries for help. Between Shades of Gray is an important book, because it is a proof that these cries were finally heard and made aware of.
In year 1941, as well as between the years 1945 and 1952, there was a serie of 35 deportations of more than 130,000 people to Siberia, from which more than 70% were women and children. Their final destination were mostly labour camps around Irkutsk or Krasnojarsk. Over 30,000 people died either on the way or during hard work in the camps. The reasons were mainly terrible life conditions, physical exhaustion or illness and – in most cases – the freezing cold near the Arctic circle.
Lina is fifteen and also the main character of this book. She gets arrested by the Russian secret police along with her family in the middle of the night. In the next few minutes, she ends up on a cart with some other people. No one knows where they are going and mainly – why did that happen to them, of all people. And this is how the long travel in cattle cars starts. Lina is determined to find her father, since she discovers they have taken him earlier during the day. She begins to draw, documenting every aspect and every memory of her journey. And hopes that one day, it shall get to her father...
My first impression of this book was, as I have found out, rather identical to other readers. How can such a harsh and violent story be told in such a soft and fragile way? There are moments when you feel like you have to close your eyes, because they are just too gruesome to handle. And they are balanced with delicate and happy little bits and pieces which make you appreciate every petty thing in your life and change your perspective. At the end, you smile and cry just the same and then, there is a long period of post-book-depression where you try your hardest to embed yourself into a normal life again.
The most interesting aspect was to read a book written by an american writer with Lithuanian roots about Baltic people and in German. I hate to read translated books and I would always rather grab for the original language, but now I can defend the German translation by Henning Ahrens, who has made a really good job at translating this fine piece of amazing writing, so it's still as fluent and silky as the original. The only problem was the very frequent usage of Russian words. After the first hundred pages, however, I already knew the words 'Njet' and 'Dawai' just from the context.
The book itself is heart-breaking. But apart from that, it's also an important historical evidence. Every little detail from this book comes from a real story of some deportation survivor. Everything that happens are stories of people, who could not talk about their fates until now. The author Ruta Šepetys comes from Lithuania and all this misfortune happened to her relatives as well. During her hunt for information, which she loved by the way, she has met people who survived these events and were kind enough to tell what happened to them. And these stories together came to create Between Shades of Gray.
“We'd been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean.”