Lina is a
character from a novel called Between Shades of Gray. Lina isn’t the
average teenage girl. Lina has had to undergo many problem that none of us will
probably never have to face in our lifetime. Lina started off as an innocent
teenage girl. She was just like us. However Lina isn’t an innocent teenage girl
anymore, but now she has grown up even though it has been only ten months. She
is still fifteen, but why is she grown up? Lina was taken I mean stolen from
her home. She was forced into unliveable circumstances, and into an inhuman
lifestyle. She isn’t the same person she was ten months ago. She has
experiences cruelty, murder, sickness, insanity, and starvation all in one
week. Don’t you think that after ten months she has the mind of an adult? Lina
can’t be a child anymore. She has to think and act like a grown up if she wants
to survive.
Lina is hard working. She puts all the effort and strength
she has for making a small food ration. All the food she is allowed to have per
day is three hundred grams. “If Jonas received bread for working indoor on
shoes, we must certainly be getting an entire turkey, I thought. “We are
entitled to three hundred grams of bread for our work” explained Jonas.” Pg.132.
Don’t you understand what I mean by
inhuman living conditions? Lina has to work hard labour every day. She works
full days. She has to deal with horrible work without receiving barely any food
or water. The work she does takes away her strength, and causes her to be like
some slave. If she doesn’t work Lina will starve to death. Without doing hard
work you don’t get any food, and we all now we need food to survive. Lina is
hard working so she can live. She works for the sake of her own life.
What you can also tell from the picture is that Lina is close
to death. I don’t mean she is standing next to the guy with the black cloak on
with the scythe. What I mean is that since Lina is so close to starvation, over
working, and the chance of being murdered she could die any minute now. She is
lucky to have survived these ten months.
“Was it harder to die, or harder to be the one who survived?” The NKVD
have been starving her, overworking her, and they have almost killed her. Lina
is so skinny from hardly having anything to eat. There is a hollow pit where
her stomach should be. Everyone in the labour camp is close to death. If your family
was sent to a labour camp, the chances of any of you surviving would be few. If
anyone survived it would most likely be a small few.
Another trait that is shown is this picture is hope, yes
hope. Lina has hope, and it is a marvellous treasure to have. How could someone
like Lina continue to have hope from what she has been through? If you don’t
have hope your chance of death could be more likely. You could give up on your
life, and if you gave up in the labour camps you would be killed. Here there is
no backing down. Even if you are exhausted, sick, or starving you need hope to
keep you going through the day. Lina hopes to go home, be in Andrius’ arms, see
her father, and see her cousin Joana. “Like mother, I tried to think of the
positive. I thought of Andrius. I could still hear his voice. At least we had
left the commander and Kretskey behind. I hoped we would be somewhere near
Krasnoyarsk, closer to Papa.” Pg. 250. Having the memories of what she hopes
for gives her the strength to go on. Each night Lina looks at her family photo,
her fingers trace the outline of her father’s face. Just seeing her father one
more time even if it is through a photo gives Lina strength. And strength is
what Lina needs.
