by Ruta Sepetys
“So this is their plan,” said the bald man, looking around. “This is how Stalin will end us? He’ll let us freeze to death. He’ll let the foxes eat us.”
“Foxes?” said Mrs. Rimas. Janina’s mother snapped a glance at the bald man.
“If there are foxes, we can eat them,” said Jonas.
“Have you ever caught a fox, boy?” asked the bald man.
“No, but I’m sure it can be done,” said Jonas.
“He said we have to build a factory for them,” I said.
“This can’t be our destination,” said Mother. “Surely they’re going to transport us somewhere else.”
“Don’t be so sure, Elena,” said the man who wound his watch. “To the Soviets, there is no more Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia. Stalin must completely get rid of us to see his vision unlittered.”
Litter. Is that what we were to Stalin?
“It’s nearly September,” said the man who wound his watch. “Soon the polar night will be upon us.”
Nearly September. We were freezing. We had learned about the polar night in school. In the polar region, the sun falls below the horizon for 180 days. Darkness for nearly half a year. I hadn’t paid much attention to the lecture in school. I had sketched the sun sinking over the horizon. Now my heart sank into my stomach where the bile began to chew it.
“We haven’t much time,” continued the man who wound his watch. “I think—”
“STOP IT! Stop talking!” shrieked Janina’s mother.
“What’s wrong, dear?” asked Mother.
“Shh ... Don’t draw the attention of the guards,” said Mrs. Rimas.
“Mama, what’s wrong?” asked Janina. Her mother continued shrieking.
The woman had barely spoken during the entire voyage and suddenly we couldn’t make her stop.
“I can’t do this! I won’t die here. I will not let a fox eat us!” Suddenly the woman grabbed Janina by the throat. A thick gurgle came from Janina’s windpipe.
Mother threw herself on Janina’s mother and pried her fingers from her daughter’s neck. Janina caught her breath and began to sob.
“I’m so sorry,” cried her mother. She turned her back to us, placed her hands on her own throat, and tried to strangle herself.
Mrs. Rimas slapped the woman across the face. The man who wound his watch restrained her arms.
“What’s wrong with you? If you want to kill yourself, do it in private,” said the bald man.
“It’s your fault,” I said. “You told her she’d be eaten by a fox.”
“Stop it, Lina,” said Jonas.
“Mama,” sobbed Janina.
“She already talks to her dead doll. Do we really want to hear about her dead mother?” said the bald man.
“Mama!” shrieked Janina.
“You’re going to be fine,” said Mother, stroking the woman’s filthy hair. “We’re all going to be fine. We mustn’t lose our senses. It’s going to be all right. Really.”
70
AT DAYBREAK, the NKVD shouted at us to get to work. My neck hurt from sleeping on my suitcase. Jonas and Mother had slept under a fishing boat to protect themselves from the wind. I had slept only a few hours. After everyone was asleep, I drew by moonlight. I sketched Janina’s mother, her hands squeezing tight around her daughter’s neck, Janina’s eyes bulging. I wrote a letter to Andrius, telling him we were in Trofimovsk. How would I ever mail the letter? Would Andrius think I had forgotten about him? I’ll find you, he had said. How could he ever find us here? Papa, I thought. You’re coming for us. Hurry.
The NKVD divided us into twenty-five groups, fifteen people per group. We were group number eleven. They took the men with any strength and sent them to work finishing the NKVD barracks. The boys were sent to fish in the Laptev Sea. The remainder of the women and elderly were instructed to build a jurta, a hut, for their group. We could not, however, use any of the bricks or wood near the NKVD building. Those were reserved for the NKVD barracks. After all, winter was coming and the NKVD needed warm housing, said Ivanov, the brown-toothed guard. We could use scraps or pieces of logs that might have floated ashore.
“Before we even think of building something, we’ll need supplies,” said Mrs. Rimas. “Hurry, scatter and pick up anything and everything you can find before the others take it all. Bring it back here.”
I picked up large stones, sticks, and chips of brick. Were we really going to build a house from sticks and stones? Mother and Mrs. Rimas found logs that had washed ashore. They dragged them all the way back to our site and went back for more. I saw a woman digging up moss with her hands and using it as mortar between the rocks. Janina and I ripped up pieces of moss and piled it near our supplies. My stomach churned with hunger. I couldn’t wait for Jonas to return with the fish.
He returned, wet and shivering. His hands were empty.
“Where are the fish?” I asked. My teeth chattered.
“The guards say we’re not allowed fish. All of the fish we catch is stored for the NKVD.”
“What will we eat?” I asked.
“Bread rations,” he replied.
It took us a week to collect enough logs to create a framework for our jurta. The men discussed the design. I drew the sketches.
“These logs don’t look very strong,” commented Jonas. “They’re just driftwood.”
“It’s all we have,” said the man who wound his watch. “We must hurry. We must finish before the first snow comes. If we don’t, we won’t survive.”
“Hurry. Hurry,” said the repeater.
I dug deep notches in the hard dirt with a flat stone. The ground was frozen. As I dug deeper, I had to hack at ice. Mother, Mrs. Rimas and I stood the logs vertically in the notches. We packed dirt around them.
“It doesn’t look big enough for fifteen people,” I said, looking at the framing. The wind whipped, stinging my face.
“We’ll be warmer if we’re close together,” said Mother.
Ivanov approached with Kretzsky. I understood most of the conversation.
“The slowest pigs in Trofimovsk!” said Ivanov through his rotten teeth.
“You need a roof,” said Kretzsky, motioning with his cigarette.
“Yes, I know. And heat?” I said. We had enough logs for a roof, but what would we do for heat?
“We’ll need a stove,” Mother said in Russian.
Ivanov found that particularly funny. “You’d like a stove? What else? A hot bath? A glass of cognac? Shut up and get to work.” He walked away.
Mother looked at Kretzsky.
He looked down and then walked off.
“See, he won’t help,” I said.
We worked for another week, building from scratch. It wasn’t a house. It was a dung heap, a bunch of logs covered in mud, sand, and moss. It looked like something a child would make in the dirt. And we had to live in it.
The men finished building the barracks and a bakery for the NKVD. They were proper brick buildings with stoves or fireplaces in each room. The man who wound his watch said it was well outfitted. And we were expected to endure an arctic winter in a mud hut? No, they expected us not to endure at all.
71
THE DAY AFTER we finished our jurta, Janina came running to me. “Lina, there’s a ship! There’s a ship coming!”
Within seconds, the NKVD was upon us, pointing rifles in our faces. They ordered everyone into their jurtas. They ran, screaming, frantic.
“Jonas?” Mother yelled. “Lina, where is Jonas?”
“He was sent to fish,” I said.
“Davai!” barked Ivanov, pushing me into the jurta.
“Jonas!” yelled Mother, stumbling to get away from Ivanov.
“He’s coming, Elena,” said Mr. Lukas, running toward us. “I saw him behind me.”
Jonas arrived, out of breath from running. “Mother, there’s a ship. It has an American flag.”
“The Americans have arrived. They’ve arrived!” said the repeater.
“W
ill the Americans fight the NKVD?” asked Janina.
“Stupid girl. The Americans are helping the NKVD,” said the bald man.
“They’re hiding us,” said Mother. “The guards don’t want the Americans to see us, to know what they’re doing to us.”
“Won’t the Americans wonder what these mud huts are?” I asked.
“They’ll think they’re some sort of military unit,” said the man who wound his watch.
“Should we run out, so the Americans can see us?” I asked.
“They’ll shoot you,” said the bald man.
“Stay put, Lina!” said Mother. “Do you understand me?”
She was right. The NKVD was hiding us from the Americans. We stayed in our jurtas for more than five hours. That’s how long it took for the American ship to be unloaded. As soon as the ship sailed, the NKVD came screaming for us to get to work. There were supplies to be moved to the bakery and NKVD barracks. I watched as the American ship drifted out of sight, pulling thoughts of rescue away with it. I wanted to run to the shore, waving my arms, screaming.
The supplies were stacked on large wooden pallets and stood as tall and wide as four homes in Kaunas. Food. It was so close. Jonas told me to keep an eye on the wood from the pallet, that we could use it to build a door for our jurta.
The man who wound his watch spoke English. He translated the markings on the containers. Canned peas, tomatoes, butter, condensed milk, powdered eggs, sugar, flour, vodka, whiskey. More than three hundred Lithuanians and Finns moved mountains of food and supplies they would never again touch. How much food was there in America that a ship could drop such an enormous supply for fewer than twenty guards? And now the Americans had sailed away. Did they know the Soviets’ gruesome secret? Were they turning the other cheek?
After the food, we moved supplies—kerosene, fishing nets, fur-lined coats, hats, thick leather gloves. The NKVD would be cozy for the winter. The wind blew through my threadbare coat. I strained to lift crate after crate with Jonas.
“Please, stop,” Mother told Mr. Lukas.
“I’m sorry,” he said, winding his watch. “It calms me.”
“That’s not what I mean. Stop translating the words on the crates. I can’t bear to know what we’re carrying anymore,” Mother said as she walked away.
“I want to know,” objected the bald man. “I want to know what might be available if the opportunity presents itself for one of you.”
“What does he mean?” asked Jonas.
“Probably that he wants us to steal things for him,” I said.
“She’s doing it again,” said Jonas.
“What?” I asked.
Jonas motioned to Mother. She was talking to Kretzsky.
72
JONAS FOUND AN EMPTY barrel floating in the Laptev Sea. He was able to pull it ashore with a log. He rolled it up to our jurta. The men cheered.
“For a stove,” Jonas said, smiling.
“Good work, darling!” said Mother.
The men set to work on the barrel, using empty tin cans from the NKVD’s trash to create a stovepipe.
It was risky to carry or save your bread ration when Ivanov was around. He loved to take bread rations. Three hundred grams. That’s all we got. Once, I saw him snatch a piece of bread from an old woman in line at the bakery. He popped it into his mouth and chewed it up. She watched, her empty mouth chewing along with his. He spit it on her feet. She scrambled to pick up every chewed piece and eat it. Mrs. Rimas said she heard Ivanov had been reassigned from a prison in Krasnoyarsk. The assignment in Trofimovsk had to be a demotion. Had Kretzsky also been demoted? I wondered if Ivanov had been at the same prison as Papa.
My stomach burned. I longed for the gray porridge they gave us on the train. I drew detailed pictures of food—steaming chicken with crispy, glazed skin, bowls of plums, apple cakes with crumbling crusts. I wrote down the details of the American ship and the food it carried.
The NKVD set us to rolling logs out of the Laptev Sea. We were to chop them up to dry for firewood. We weren’t allowed any wood for ourselves. We sat in our jurta facing the empty stove. I saw plates with food being taken from our dinner table and the pieces scraped into the trash. I heard Jonas’s voice saying, But Mother, I’m not hungry when told to finish his dinner. Not hungry. When were we ever not hungry?
“I’m cold,” said Janina.
“Well, go find some wood for the stove then!” said the bald man.
“Where can I find it?” she asked.
“You can steal it. Near the NKVD building,” he replied. “That’s where the others are getting it.”
“Don’t send her to steal. I’ll go find something,” I said.
“I’ll come with you,” said Jonas.
“Mother?” I expected her to protest.
“Hmm?” she said.
“Jonas and I are going to look for wood.”
“All right, dear,” she said softly.
“Is Mother okay?” I asked Jonas as we walked out of our mud hut.
“She seems weaker and confused,” said Jonas.
I stopped. “Jonas, have you seen Mother eat?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Think about it. We’ve seen her nibble, but she’s always giving us bread,” I said. “Just yesterday she gave us bread. She said it was an additional ration she got for hauling logs.”
“Do you think she’s giving us her ration?”
“Yes, or at least part of it,” I said. Mother was starving herself to feed us.
The wind howled as we walked toward the NKVD building. My throat burned with each breath. The sun did not appear. The polar night had begun. The desolate landscape was painted in blues and grays by the moon. The repeater kept saying we had to make it through the first winter. Mother agreed. If we could make it through the first winter, we’d survive. We had to endure the polar night and see the sun return.
“Are you cold?” asked Jonas.
“Freezing.” The wind sliced through my clothing and stabbed at my skin.
“Do you want my coat?” he asked. “I think it will fit.”
I looked at my brother. The coat Mother had traded was too big for him. He’d grow into it.
“No, then you’ll be cold,” I said. “But thanks.”
“Vilkas!” Kretzsky. He wore a long wool coat and carried a canvas sack.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Looking for driftwood to burn,” said Jonas. “Have you seen any?”
Kretzsky hesitated. He reached into the bag and threw a piece of wood at our shins, walking away before we could say anything.
That night, September 26, the first snowstorm arrived.
It lasted two days. The wind and snow bellowed and blew through the cracks in our jurta. The freezing temperatures crept into my knees and hips. They ached and throbbed, making it hard to move. We huddled together for warmth. The repeater pushed in close. His breath smelled rotten.
“Did you eat fish?” asked the bald man.
“Fish? Yes, a little fish,” said the man.
“Why didn’t you bring any for us?” demanded the bald man. Others also yelled at the repeater, calling him selfish.
“I stole it. There was just a little. Only a little.”
“Liale doesn’t like fish,” whispered Janina. I looked at her. She clawed her scalp.
“Does it itch?” I asked.
She nodded. Lice. It was only a matter of time before our entire mud hut was crawling with them.
We took turns digging a path out the front door to make our way to the bakery for rations. I scooped up large amounts of snow to melt for drinking water. Jonas made sure Mother ate her entire ration and drank water. We had been relieving ourselves outside, but with the snowstorm in full rage, we had no choice but to sit on a bucket in the jurta. As a courtesy, the sitter did not face us, but some argued the rear view was worse.
73
WHEN THE STORM broke, the NKVD yelled at us to get back t
o work. We emerged from our mud hut. Even though it was dark, the white snow brightened the charcoal landscape. But that’s all we could see—gray everywhere. The NKVD ordered us to roll and chop logs for firewood. Jonas and I passed a jurta completely covered in snow.
“No,” cried a woman outside. The tips of her fingers were bloody, her fingernails shredded.
“Idiots. They built their door so it opened out. When it snowed, they trapped themselves inside. The weaklings couldn’t pull or claw the door down!” Ivanov laughed, slapping his thigh. “Four of them are dead in there! Stupid pigs,” he said to another guard.
Jonas’s mouth hung open. “What are you looking at?” yelled Ivanov. “Get to work.”
I pulled Jonas away from the crying woman and the snowcovered mound.
“He was laughing. Those people died and Ivanov was laughing,” I said.
“Four people died in the very first snowstorm,” said Jonas, looking at his feet. “Maybe more. We need more wood. We have to make it through the winter.”
They split us into groups. I had to walk three kilometers to the tree line to find wood for the NKVD. The bald man was in my group. We trudged through the snow, a dry crunching underfoot.
“How am I expected to walk in this with my bad leg?” complained the bald man.
I tried to rush ahead. I didn’t want to be stuck with him. He would slow me down.
“Don’t you leave me!” he said. “Give me your mittens.”
“What?”
“Give me your mittens. I don’t have any.”
“No. My hands will freeze,” I said, the cold already scraping against my face.
“My hands are already freezing! Give me your mittens. It’s only for a few minutes. You can put your hands in your pockets.”
I thought about my brother offering me his coat, and wondered if I should share my mittens with the bald man.
“Give me your mittens and I’ll tell you something,” he said.
“What are you going to tell me?” I asked, suspicious.
“Something you want to know.”
“What would I want to know from you?” I asked.