Ruta Sepetys · 2011 · survival

Ruta Sepetys's 2011 novel, based on true events. In 1941 the fifteen-year-old Lina and her family are seized from their home in Lithuania by Stalin's police and deported in cattle cars across the Soviet Union - to a brutal labour camp in the Altai, then far north to the Arctic wastes of Trofimovsk - where art, memory and hope become the tools of survival.

1. 1
   Kaunas

   On a June night in 1941 the NKVD seize Lina, her mother and brother from their home; her father has already been taken.

2. 2
   Altai Labour Camp

   After six weeks in a cattle car the deportees reach a beet farm in the Altai, worked on starvation rations of bread.

3. 3
   The Lena (Ust-Kut)

   Nearly a year on they are moved again by train and truck to the Lena, and loaded onto barges heading north.

4. 4
   Trofimovsk

   A desolate spit above the Arctic Circle at the Lena's mouth, where the exiles build mud huts and endure the polar night.