Between Shades of Gray

As she wipes her tears on a handkerchief, she realizes that she can use it to draw messages to her father that will be hidden when the handkerchief is folded. As she is planning her handkerchief drawing, she overhears the women talking about Ona and her baby, who is still unable to nurse. The train journey continues for days, stopping once a day to remove dead bodies from the cars and deliver gray slop to the prisoners. The prisoners take turns to leave the car to get the food, and when it is Lina’s turn, it is raining. She sees the body of a child being thrown into the mud and watches the child’s mother being beaten for trying to follow her child. She looks back at her own car and stands still, remembering her father’s face through the toilet hole and thinks about running away. Andrius takes the pails from her and gets the grey slop for their car, while Lina is shoved back into the car by an NKVD officer. Later she tells her mother that she wanted to run and asks her why the Soviets have decided they’re “animals” (85). Her mother reminds her that the Soviets are wrong and that they’ll all be going home soon, as soon as the rest of the world finds out what horrible things are being done to them.

The train continues to move, and the prisoners become infested with lice, which, along with a lack of light and insufficient nourishment, make their circumstances even more miserable. When they make their daily stop for the gray slop that are subsisting on, they try to keep track of the number of bodies being thrown out. Jonas keeps a special count of the dead children. Lina continues to draw on her handkerchief, including their path through Vilnius, Minsk, Orsha, and Smolensk, along with the family’s birthdays and “a drawing of a vilkas—a wolf” (86). The gray-haired man who winds his watch notices her drawing and offers to help her pass the handkerchief to someone they can trust to understand its importance. After eight days of travel, their train passes another train, this one full of Russian soldiers headed to the front, and they learn that the Soviet Union is at war with Germany and that Germany has invaded Lithuania. Everyone is elated to hear it, except for Ona, whose baby has died.

The grief-stricken Ona is unwilling to give up her dead baby. The bald man scoffs at her pain and Andrius explodes with anger, telling him they will leave him behind “[w]hen the Germans kick the Soviets out of Lithuania” (88). The bald man, unfazed by Andrius’s anger or his threats, tells them that Hitler is no better than Stalin, and that Germany will not save them.

The death of Ona’s baby upsets Jonas the most. He marks her death in his scratched tally on the floor, but then begins “slamming the stone against the markings […] with such force” (89) that Lina is worried he will break his hand. Andrius stops her from trying to reign in Jonas’s anger, saying that it is “[b]etter than he gets used to it” (89). Lina wonders what it is he should “get used to,” and asks Andrius if he is “used to it.” He lights a cigarette and says yes. 

As the adults continue to talk about the war with Germany, Lina thinks about her father, remembering the time he sat for her to draw his portrait and wondering if he knows how much she misses him. She remembers that he was unable to sit still and teased her about his eyes being crooked in the drawing. They talked about Lina’s cousin Joana, and when the portrait was finished, Lina showed it to him. He asked her about the “scribble” that is her signature, saying that no one will recognize it. He will, she told him.

The train crosses the Ural Mountains into Asia. Three days after the baby dies, they convince Ona to dispose of its putrefying body through the toilet hole, which seems better than allowing the guards to toss it into the mud. Ona cannot bring herself to do it, so Miss Grybas snatches it from her and does it herself. Jonas is withdrawn and angry, spending much of his time with Andrius. One night Lina catches him smoking. She is upset, but not as upset as she is later, when she finds out they’ve been tearing pages out of her treasured copy of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers—given to her by her grandmother—to use as smoking material.  

Once on the Asian continent, they lose track of the days, but at one stop, Lina’s mother is able to get out and buy treats—candy and cigarettes—at a lonely countryside kiosk that does not stock anything substantial like bread or newspapers. A couple of days later, Andrius finds an “oval stone full of quartz and other minerals” (97) when he goes out to fill their buckets with gray slop. This find, along with Elena’s gifts of candy and cigarettes, provide a couple of bright spots—“some small goodness” (96)—in their otherwise gray existence.

After six weeks of travel, and three days without food, they arrive “somewhere in the Altai region, just north of China” (98). After disembarking from the train, the prisoners find themselves “in a wide, deep valley, surrounded by forested hills” (99). They are able to see one another more clearly and are shocked at their tattered and gray condition. Their muscles have atrophied, but resting in the grass feels “heavenly” (99). As she looks around, Lina realizes that Ona is only a few years older than her, that Mrs. Rimas is close to her mother’s age, and that Mrs. Arvydas is very attractive. The gray-haired man asks to borrow Lina’s handkerchief and is able to pass it on to someone from another train car. They soon realize that they are being sold off in groups to men who are negotiating with the NKVD guards.  

When the NKVD guards approach with the buyers, their group pretends that Andrius is dim-witted, which, along with the bald man’s moaning and Ona’s crying, prevents them from being sold. They consider trying to escape but hear shots and decide it’s too dangerous. They try to find out from a guard where they are going, but he ignores Elena’s questions. Lina feels energized by the sun and fresh air as she watches their train leaves. Andrius predicts that it is “going back for more” (103) because the Soviets won’t stop “until they’ve gotten rid of all of” them (103).  

Their group is one of only two left. They enjoy the day; lying in the grass and sun, talking about their situation and how they got there. Lina tries to explain “the list” to Jonas, and Andrius expresses surprise that his mother has made it as far as she has. Jonas sees a cannon in the clouds in the sky, and Lina tells him to make it blow up the Soviets. Andrius tells her that she seems to always have “a mouthful of opinions” (106), and Jonas reminds her that “That’s what Papa said” (106). The mention of her father and her opinions reminds her of the time when her father scolded her for drawing a cartoon depicting Stalin as a clown, which he tore up, calling it a “waste” (106-7) of her talent and reminding her how dangerous it is to speak against the Soviets. Andrius stares at her, asking whether she really wants to “blow up the Soviets” (107). She tells him she just wants to go home and to see her father again.

Later, after Jonas has fallen asleep and Elena is trying to comfort the grieving Ona, Andrius catches Lina staring at him, while she imagines being able to draw him. She turns away, embarrassed to be caught, but he rolls her the “stone with the sparkles he had found” (109). When she tries to roll it back, he tells her to keep it. The next morning, men come and buy the other remaining group, and their group is loaded into trucks and driven to a building where they are divided by gender. Then men and boys go first; they are ordered to strip down and then taken inside the building to shower.  

When the women strip for their showers, the guards stare. It is the first time Lina has “been naked in front of a man” (113), and her disgust at the guards’ lascivious behavior towards Mrs. Arvydas draws more attention to her. One guard grabs her breast, but her mother yells at him and moves Lina away, pushing her behind Ona. The guard screams at her mother, but the confrontation does not go beyond that, and the women are taken into the building to shower.

After their brief, cold, but much needed showers, everyone feels better, except for Ona, who resumes her chant of “No, no, no, no” (108), and is “standing up, sitting down, and pulling her hair” (115) in the back of the truck as they prepare to leave. An NKVD officer—the commander—notices and pulls her from the truck. She fights him, and he throws her to the ground and shoots her in the head with his pistol. Andrius holds Jonas, covering his face, and tells Lina to look away. When she looks back again, she sees the “young blond guard […] staring at Ona’s body” (116). Elena is shocked and saddened, and Jonas moves closer to Lina and begs her not to make the guards angry. Lina vows to continue drawing and writing about what happens to them.

They leave Ona’s body behind and arrive at a “large collective farming area” (118) where they are ordered to share a small shack with a “squat Altaian woman” (118) who calls them “filthy criminals” (118). When the woman tries to drag Lina out of the hut by her hair, Elena yells at her in Russian, slaps her and pushes her away, while Jonas kicks her in the shin. The woman then laughs, calling them “feisty” (119) and tells them they will need to pay rent. From her, they learn that they are on a beet and potato farm, a “kolkhoz” or collective farm, but that food is rationed and “the guards oversee the farm and the workers” (119).