Getting ready
In the second chapter, after the police came to take Elena and her children, Elena tells her children to get ready and to pack as many things as possible. The youngest, Jonas, who was only ten years old mistook her mother and got ready in the clothes he used to war when he went to school. When Jonas enters the room and is seen by his mother, she starts to cry realizing just how innocent her son is and that he doesn’t realize that they are not preparing to go somewhere nice but rather that they are arrested. The picture of innocence the author presents is important because it will only highlight how much the children will change as time will pass by.
Bloody woman
In the fourth chapter, while Lina and her family are sitting inside the truck, a woman in a bloody grown is brought from a hospital and made to enter the truck. The woman just had her baby a few moments ago and she was taken by the police with her baby either way. The sight of the woman in her bloody grown and with a newborn baby in her arms makes Lina realize just how ruthless the NKVD really was. They arrested everybody, including babies, children, women or elderly people for the simple fact that they associated themselves at some point with men considered dangerous by the regime. Thus, the NKVD is portrayed here as being ruthless, heartless and emotionless when faced with suffering and pain.
How much it changed
After being forced to enter cattle cars, the prisoners try to do their best to remain calm and be comfortable in the overcrowded train cars. At one point, Elena tries to peer out the train car’s window to try and look for her husband and a kind man offers to let her climb on his suitcase to have a better look outside. Then, the man compliments Lina, telling her she is beautiful. The man’s words trigger in Lina a flashback and the young girl remembers and instance when she and her family had their family photo taken and the photographer complimented her and compared her to her father. The parallel drawn between the two situations has the purpose of highlighting just how much Lina’s situation changed and how the once happy and normal environment she was used to transformed into something completely different. The once happy memory and portrayal of her past is suddenly changed by the cruel present that reminds Lina that the life she used to have is gone.
Dead children
During the long journey to the work camps, the train stopped only once per day to give the people inside the car trains buckets with bad food to eat and to take out the bodies of the ones who have died. Lina saw how the Soviets dealt with the dead bodies when it was her time to get out of the train and get the buckets with food. Then, she saw the bodies of small children being thrown into the mud and desperate mother crying after their dead children. The image portrayed here has the purpose of showing just how ruthless the Soviets were and how insensitive the prisoners became over time because as the days dragged on and they were exposed to the same things every day, they became immune to the inhuman sights.
