Review by Susan Simonton
Night, 1941, Vilnius, Lithuania,
fists pounding on the door, mother calling everyone to pack everything they can
and come downstairs. Fifteen year old Lina, still in her nightgown, grabs her
drawing pad, helps her little brother and hurries down stairs. Her mother is
breaking all the china and glassware in the dining room.
“I’ll leave nothing for them.”
And so mother, Jonas and Lina are
taken by the Soviet troops, loaded into cattle cars with many others. The old,
the sick, a woman, bleeding, who had just given birth, children all crammed
together in a railroad car labeled “Thieves and prostitutes.”
Thus begins a long journey across
Russia to Siberia and the forced labor camps and finally to the Laptev Sea in
the Arctic circle. A journey of hardship and sorrow but finally, hope.
Between Shades of Grey is listed in the library
as Teen Fiction, but it is a good read for anyone — a good story, a piece of
history, knowledge of which few of us have any idea, and a young survivor at
the heart of it.
The author is the daughter of a
Lithuanian refugee. She carefully researched the events in the story with
survivors in Lithuania.
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