The Truth About Communism, Through Popular Fiction
A Soviet submarine torpedoes the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, January 30, 1945 (art by Vladimir Kosov)
By Amity Shlaes
This review is from Amity Shlaes’s regular column “The Forgotten Book,” which she pens for “Capital Matters” as a fellow of National Review Institute.
Schools don’t teach the record of communism.
Schools don’t teach the names of Eastern Europe’s old dictators.
Schools don’t teach the battles of World War II.
What schools don’t teach keeps adults up at night. Those exceptional schools that do deliver traditional history—home schools, parochial schools, charters—still number too few to provide consolation.
Historical fiction can make up for what schools fail to deliver. But over recent decades the Young Adult market has favored fantasy over fact. A kind of miracle, therefore, has been the breakthrough of Ruta Sepetys.
Monster
Sepetys’s historical fiction for teens routinely makes bestseller lists and has been translated into more than two dozen languages. The author has won an impressive range of honors, including the Carnegie Prize and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship. Yet Sepetys does treat the history of the twentieth century, with plenty of attention to communism’s record—and accurately, to boot.
Consider I Must Betray You, Sepetys’s 2022 account of Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. “Some believe that Dracula is the most frightening character associated with Romania,” comments Sepetys. Then she sets her reader right: “Dracula is fiction with no real connection to Romanian history. But there was once a real bloodthirsty monster living in a castle in Romania. He remained in his tower for twenty-four years.” This other monster, Ceausescu, denied Romanians “food, electricity, truth, and freedom.”
Ronald Reagan couldn’t have put it better.
One in fifty Romanians worked for the Securitate, Romania’s secret police. “Fear arrived at five o’clock,” commences one of Sepetys’s chapters—the moment a Secu thug with “paddles for hands” blackmails a high-school boy into spying on friends and family.
She also captures the terror that hung over Bucharest in the Cold War period: a city where children carried sticks to ward off packs of stray dogs, where the only meat for sale was the feet of slaughtered chickens and pigs, pieces of near-offal that sarcastic Romanians dubbed “patriots,” as the rest of the animal parts were exported to Russia.
There’s little sex in this novel, but there is torture. The Secu slowly poisons the boy’s grandfather, an old rebel, lacing the coffee he drinks with a radioactive substance.
Stubborn as any teenager, Western leaders in the Cold War period willed themselves into ignorance over conditions in Romania. Our leaders concentrated on Ceausescu’s staged disagreements over foreign policy with the Kremlin. Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter met with “Draculescu”; Nixon did so four times. (Queen Elizabeth knighted him.) Sepetys covers this tragic error, too: America, her protagonist learns, “has been outfoxed by Ceausescu.”
Romania, of course, had its revolution, and it wasn’t a velvet one. Sepetys captures the December 1989 military crackdown, the clubbing of students, the attack dogs sicced on arrested minors, the thousands of Romanians who ended up in hospitals, or at Jilava Prison on the edge of Bucharest. After the revolution, her main character becomes an English teacher—a man concerned with “correcting false narratives.”
Nazis and Soviets
On finishing I Must Betray You, I started wondering: Who is she? Sepetys was born in Michigan to a Lithuanian family. She sang a little. She studied business at Hillsdale College. She spent more than a decade building an entertainment firm in Los Angeles, only to decide she wanted to look into her family’s experience in World War II. The result was Between Shades of Gray.
With this first novel, Sepetys made her crucial choice: Rather than pen a worthy monograph, she opted to tell her story from the point of view of a fictional young artist deported from Lithuania to the Siberian Gulag. “They took me in my nightgown,” runs the first line of Between Shades, which, like the Diary of Anne Frank, manages to convey through the story of one person the experience of millions deported or killed.
A film version, Ashes in the Snow, debuted at the LA Film Festival in 2018; there’s also a graphic novel. Sepetys next tried her hand at a domestic story, Out of the Easy, about escaping life in a New Orleans brothel.
Sepetys’s Meisterwerk is Salt to the Sea, an account of the Soviets’ torpedoing of the German MV Wilhelm Gustloff on the night of January 30, 1945. As many as 9,400 passengers perished in the Baltic Sea that night, multiples of the figure for far-better-known maritime tragedies such as those of the Lusitania or the Titanic. Yet most English-speaking adults don’t know about the Gustloff. It was a Nazi ship, after all, and this was war.
What Sepetys gets is that the Gustloff tragedy can teach us much about both Nazis and Soviets. Built prior to the war to showcase the “social” in “National Socialism,” the Gustloff started life as a cruise ship as part of Strength Through Joy, the Nazis’ education and recreation program for the worker. The Gustloff carried 65,000 party-picked citizens on some fifty cruises before war broke out. Every detail of the ship was designed for publicity, right down to the cabins, all alike, except, predictably, those of Hitler and his social-works director, Robert Ley. The point of the identical cabins was to prove the Nazis had made the Fatherland a classless society.
When, in 1938, Germans and Austrians voted on the annexation of Austria in parallel (and highly questionable) plebiscites, the Gustloff docked at Gravesend, collecting several thousand German and Austrian nationals. After sailing a safe three miles out off the British coast—into international waters—the captain invited the guests to cast ballots on annexation. Naturally, the outcome was for annexation, and naturally, the English press did not resist covering the stunt.
Come war, as Sepetys recounts, the Gustloff became first a hospital ship and then a floating barracks at Gotenhafen (Gdynia to us). In January 1945 she was tasked with serving the Nazis’ Operation Hannibal, the maritime rescue of Germans fleeing the advancing Russians. Gestapo personnel, wounded soldiers, and thousands of civilians—ethnic Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles—crowded onto the Gustloff. She sailed on January 30, when the thermometer stood at about eight degrees Fahrenheit, by some accounts even lower. At departure the Gustloff, designed for 1,600, and with half her lifeboats out of commission, carried more than 10,000.
Today, narrative from multiple points of view is fashionable, even among younger readers, and Sepetys allows different characters to tell the story of that fateful night: a German youth whose father aided the resistance, a Lithuanian nurse, a Pole pregnant after an assault by Red Army rapists, a twisted Nazi sailor. Three torpedoes from S-13, the Soviet sub, hit the Gustloff’s port side within hours of departure, and the crowds stampeded. Finding too few boats, some opted in their desperation to plunge into the freezing sea.
There have been other accounts, even some in English, of the Gustloff’s tragedy. Late in his career, Günter Grass covered the story in Krebsgang, English title Crabwalk, but loaded the narrative with so much Grassian irony that the book had little impact. The simple Salt to the Sea, by contrast, debuted at the number-two spot in the Young Adult category of the New York Times bestseller list, and won numerous prizes and distinctions.
Salt to the Sea was even honored by the progressive Bank Street College of Education as one of its “Best Children’s Books of the Year.” That’s quite a feat for a novel whose opening, which celebrates the killing of a Soviet soldier, could have been scripted by Radio Free Europe.
Gateway to History
One can pick at various aspects of Sepetys’s books. Some of her characters are too virtuous, and too omniscient, for believability: “Hitler set up extermination camps in German-occupied Poland, filtering the blood of innocent Jews into the Polish soil,” says one. Few Germans knew the full extent of the camps in 1945. Even fewer sympathized with the Jews. And those who did wouldn’t have talked about it, even to themselves. On her website Sepetys styles herself a “seeker of lost stories,” when a more precise description might be: “a seeker of stories not yet told well in English.”
There is far more in Sepetys to learn from than to criticize, including about how to write. She chops her chapters unconventionally short—they feel almost like blog posts. The brevity enables her to race along at contemporary tempo. She offers romance between characters, but not so much romance it obscures the history. She refrains from condescension, hard for authors. She recognizes that historical fiction can serve as gateway to traditional history and invites her readers, young or old, to walk on through.
“I hope that through reading I Must Betray You,” Sepetys writes in the postscript to her Romania book, “readers might be inspired to research the histories of the captive nations, the fall of communism in Europe, and, most relevant to this story, the incredible fortitude and endurance of the Romanian people.”
Thanks to Sepetys, the rest of us can now dare hope, too.
Amity Shlaes chairs the Coolidge Foundation and is the author of Great Society. This article first appeared in National Review’s “Capital Matters.”