Between Shades of Gray

Men, women and children herded into cattle cars with no food, water, or sanitation. Lice. People shot on sight for slight transgressions. "Snitches" granted favors by guards for betraying friends. Brutal cold, long workdays, scurvy, beatings, malnutrition. Death.

Auschwitz? Bergen Belsen? Dachau? No. The atrocities of the Holocaust have been well documented and memorialized in books, film, plays, and museums. The Illinois Holocaust Museum is here in Skokie. We have all seen Steven Spielberg's masterful film Schindler's List. More recently, there have been films about Hitler's accomplices, like Sarah's Key. And, of course, just about every teen has read the heart wrenching Diary of Anne Frank. The crimes of the Nazis were hideous and provide context to our foreign policy to this day as we close ranks with Israel to confront an Islamo-fascist regime in Iran that promises a second Holocaust.

But while all this was going on, there was a second "silent" Holocaust in places like Lithuania, Latvia and the Ukraine perpetrated by Josef Stalin. While Hitler murdered 6 million Jews, Stalin and his henchmen murdered almost 3 1/2 times as many.

"Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys reminds us that as bad as Hilter was, there was a second monster brutalizing, torturing and killing millions. While Stalin did not single out a group or industrialize his death machine as Hitler did, the scale of death and dislocation was, in fact, greater. Between Shades of Gray tells the tale of a family forced from their home, separated and shipped to a work camp in Siberia. Like Anne Frank's diary, the story is told through the eyes of a teenaged girl, and tells the story of survival and death under the cruelest, harshest circumstances imaginable. It is a story of courage and strength and sometimes betrayal and death.

For me, the Ms. Sepetys's novel brought to life the culture and people I grew up with. I was raised in an Eastern European community on the Southwest Side of Chicago and attended a Lithuanian Catholic grammar school. Many of the kids I went to school with were sons and daughters of D.P.'s (short for displaced persons) and this book reminded me of exactly what that meant. As a youngster, I failed to grasp what these people experienced. One of my best friend's parents were school teachers in Lithuania and escaped one of the work camps where they surely would have been killed. After reading Ms. Sepetys's book, I now understand the terror they must have experienced as they tunnelled under the fence and ran through the woods with guard dogs on their heels. The father of another friend of mine witnessed the KGB shooting his best friend in the head when he was a young man in the Ukraine. Such were the stories in my neighborhood.

Ms. Sepetys's book had special meaning for me. It was a vivid reminder of where I came fro and what a special place America has been for peoples of all nationalities and religions that have escaped from out-of-control, unchecked state power. It was also a reminder of why I am such a fierce defender of individual liberty for my peers were descendants of people that ran from authoritarianism.

As another authoritarian state, China, rises, Islamo-fascism threatens the West, and our own country elects a president that clearly values "fairness" over liberty, Ms. Sepetys reminds us of the horrible consequences of extreme state power.

Between Shades of Gray is a compelling read, and if you are of Eastern European extraction, it is an essential one.