Between Shades of Gray

Elena offers the grouchy woman a sterling silver serving piece to carry their letters for them and to bring back any news. She accepts. The bald man has already told them that Hitler drove Stalin out of Lithuania, but Lina wonders how he gets his information. She remembers listening to her father talk with his colleagues about Stalin and Hitler and which one was worse, with her father’s Jewish friend Dr. Seltzer telling them about Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.

One day, while they are working in the beet fields, Kretzsky comes to have Lina draw a map and copy a photograph in exchange for two cigarettes. When they are in sight of others, Kretzsky is rough, but when they are alone, he leaves her alone. Along the way, they run into two NKVD guards, one of whom points his lit cigarette at Lina’s face but stops before burning her. Kretzsky laughs with the guards but then lets his shoulders drop when they walk away. He lights a cigarette and laughs again, before dragging Lina into the office.

Several officers are present while Lina draws the map, but only Kretzsky stays with Lina while she copies the portrait of a man who “had bright eyes and a warm smile” (178). She wonders who the man is and wants to draw something “his wife and children would like to look at” (179). She also wants to keep the pen she is drawing with and drops it in her lap when Kretzsky isn’t looking. She uses the leftover coffee grounds in Kretzsky’s cup to create textures in the man’s hair, and just as she finished, the commander arrives with her cigarettes.

As Lina hurries away from the NKVD office, she hears someone crying and it turns out to be Mrs. Arvydas. Andrius is with her and he tells Lina to leave. Mrs. Arvydas has a “bloody welt that blazed across her cheek” (180). When Lina sees it, she apologizes and runs away, forgetting to give Andrius the cigarettes she had meant to give him as a peace offering. When she gets back to her shack, she does not tell Jonas what’s wrong. Instead, she draws Mrs. Arvydas until she calms down. Soon afterwards, her mother comes home, having gone out to meet the grouchy woman on her way back from town. Miss Grybas tells them to hurry and hide the things the woman has gotten for them because the NKVD is rounding them up again to try to get them to sign the papers. Lina remembers a time at the Vilkas’s dinner table, when Jonas was telling them about a child at his school who was sent to the principal’s office for talking about hell. When his father asks him why his friend would be talking about hell, Jonas reports that his friend’s father told him that they’ll all end up in hell if Stalin comes to Lithuania. 

The next day, Elena tells them what she has learned from the grouchy woman about the nearby town, which is called Turaciak. They also learn that the “Germans have taken Kiev” (185). The bald man argues that Hitler is no better than Stalin and that their “fate is genocide, no matter whose hands [they] fall into” (185). They talk about people back home whom they might write to, and Mr. Stalas tells them that they will endanger people with their “love letters” (185).

Time goes on and the weather turns colder. Andrius still will not speak to Lina, and her mother is reassigned to teach school to the Altaian and Lithuanian children in Russian. The NKVD will not allow Miss Grybas to teach, even though she is a teacher by trade, unless she signs the paper, which she refuses. Jonas is also reassigned to chop wood instead of making shoes with the two old women he had become friends with, but his Russian steadily improves. Lina is reassigned to haul “sixty-pound bags of grain on [her] back through the snow” (187). She learns from Jonas how to pilfer a few grains at a time by moving the weave of the sack aside. They learn to steal from the garbage, as well, and subsist on what they can scavenge and occasional help from the Arvydases.