Between Shades of Gray
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Between Shades of Gray trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray follows fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas, taken from her home in Lithuania in June 1941 and sent east with her mother and younger brother. Many readers meet the novel in school and do not forget it, because it tells a part of the Second World War that was kept quiet for decades. This quiz covers the whole book: the night of the arrest, the long train journey, the people who travel with Lina, life in the camps and the epilogue. It also asks about the real history behind the story, the author and the film adaptation. The questions suit students revising for a class test, book clubs, and anyone who has just finished the last page. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under which Soviet leader are Lina and her family deported to Siberia in Between Shades of Gray?
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin ordered the June 1941 deportation, which swept tens of thousands of people out of Soviet-occupied lands. Survivors were only gradually released after his death in 1953.
Q 02Which Soviet secret police force bangs on Lina's door and arrests her family in Between Shades of Gray?
NKVD
NKVD was the name of the Soviet interior ministry and secret police in one from 1934 to 1946. The same agency ran the forced-labor camps the family is sent to.
Q 03In Between Shades of Gray, how long do Soviet officers give Lina's family to pack before deporting them?
Twenty minutes
Twenty minutes is all the officers allow, though Lina's mother begs to wait until morning. Her ten-year-old son, not grasping what is happening, gets dressed for school.
Q 04In what kind of railway wagon do Lina and her family spend six weeks in Between Shades of Gray?
A cattle car
A cattle car holds Lina's group, who spend much of the trip in darkness. A hole in the corner of the floor is the only toilet.
Q 05According to the epilogue of Between Shades of Gray, which man from her years in Siberia does Lina marry?
Andrius Arvydas
Andrius Arvydas is seventeen when Lina meets him on the deportation train, and the two are parted when her family is sent north. The epilogue shows they found each other again.
Q 06In Between Shades of Gray, which illness does a stolen can of tomatoes help Lina's brother Jonas survive?
Scurvy
Scurvy strikes Jonas a second time in the Arctic camp, when the food runs even shorter. Raw fish is what finally pulls him through.
Q 07In Between Shades of Gray, what container holds the writings and drawings Lina buries in Lithuanian soil?
A glass jar
A glass jar protects Lina's papers until construction workers dig it up in 1995. Real deportee Dalia Grinkeviciute hid her own memoir the same way, and it was found in 1991.
Q 08Under which title was Between Shades of Gray adapted into a 2018 film starring Bel Powley?
Ashes in the Snow
Ashes in the Snow premiered at the LA Film Festival in September 2018 with Powley as Lina. The novel was later republished under the film's name.
Q 09Which word, formed from a Russian acronym, names the Soviet prison camp system depicted in Between Shades of Gray?
Gulag
Gulag shortens the Russian for Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps, the agency in charge. In English the word came to mean the whole system of unfree labor.
Q 10In Between Shades of Gray, the Vilkas family is arrested after helping Lina's cousin flee to which country?
Germany
Germany took in the cousin's family before the deportations began, an escape Lina's father helped arrange. Lina learns only at the Arctic camp that this is why her own family was taken.
Q 11In Between Shades of Gray, which cousin and best friend is Lina writing to when Soviet officers pound on the door?
Joana
Joana is the older cousin Lina spent her summers with, and memories of her return throughout the exile. She never appears in person, only in flashbacks.
Q 12In Between Shades of Gray, what is the first name of Lina's mother, who dies in the Arctic camp?
Elena
Elena gives up her own rations to keep her sick son alive, then falls ill herself. She is remembered for sharing food and valuables with everyone in the group.
Q 13In which Lithuanian city, the temporary capital between the world wars, does Lina live in Between Shades of Gray?
Kaunas
Kaunas served as Lithuania's temporary capital from 1920 to 1939, while Vilnius was held by Poland. The epilogue returns there, to the spot where Lina's papers are unearthed.
Q 21Between Shades of Gray was shortlisted in 2012 for which British children's book prize that Ruta Sepetys won in 2017?
Carnegie Medal
Carnegie Medal judges shortlisted her debut, then gave her the prize five years later for another historical novel. She collected it at a ceremony in London.
Q 22Ruta Sepetys, author of Between Shades of Gray, was born in which American city to a Lithuanian refugee father?
Detroit
Detroit is where her father's family settled in 1949, after fleeing Lithuania and spending nine years in refugee camps. Her grandfather, an engineer, found work there.
Q 23Before writing Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys spent years in Los Angeles working in which business?
Music management
Q 14In Between Shades of Gray, which European painter does Lina idolize for painting feelings rather than appearances?
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch shapes the way Lina draws the people around her: as she feels them, not as they look. Asked to draw the camp commander, she longs to give him hollow black eyes and snakes at his neck.
Q 15In Between Shades of Gray, which author wrote the book Lina is given as a surprise on her sixteenth birthday?
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens wrote the gift, Dombey and Son, and also The Pickwick Papers, a present from Lina's grandmother. Pages of that second book get rolled into cigarettes on the train.
Q 16In Between Shades of Gray, what does Lina's mother hand a Soviet officer so that Jonas can stay with the family?
A pocket watch
A pocket watch made of gold, once her father's, buys her son's place beside her at the station. Lina is horrified that her brother's life is worth so little to the officer.
Q 17In Between Shades of Gray, on what item does Lina draw a message meant to pass hand to hand to her father?
A handkerchief
A handkerchief is ordinary enough to travel between deportees without alarming the guards. Lina covers it with pictures her father would know as hers.
Q 18In Between Shades of Gray, a file Lina takes after drawing the commander places her father in a prison in which city?
Krasnoyarsk
Krasnoyarsk is the prison city the file names for her father, so Lina starts aiming her drawings there. She carries the folder out hidden beneath her coat.
Q 19After six weeks by train in Between Shades of Gray, Lina's group is unloaded in which region just north of China?
Altai
Altai is the bald man's guess when the journey ends, and he is right. The family is put to work there digging the fields of a collective farm.
Q 20Lina's cousin from Between Shades of Gray returns as a main character in which 2016 Ruta Sepetys novel?
Salt to the Sea
Salt to the Sea follows refugees making for the doomed ship Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945. In it the cousin, now a nurse, blames herself for the deportation of Lina's family.
Music management was her first career: in 1994 she launched Sepetys Entertainment Group to represent songwriters and recording artists. Rolling Stone featured her in a 2002 Women in Rock issue.
Q 24Lina's surname in Between Shades of Gray, Vilkas, is the Lithuanian word for which animal?
Wolf
Wolf is the literal meaning of Vilkas, a real Lithuanian family name. The animal runs deep in national legend: an iron one appears in the medieval story of the founding of Vilnius.
Q 25In 2013, Ruta Sepetys became the first American young adult author to give a presentation at which institution?
The European Parliament
The European Parliament heard her in March 2013, two years after her debut novel appeared. She went on to become the first such author to speak at NATO as well.
Q 26Which 1939 Nazi–Soviet deal divided Eastern Europe and opened the way to the occupation in Between Shades of Gray?
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact terms split the region into spheres of influence in August 1939. Within a year the Soviet Union had occupied and annexed all three Baltic countries.
Q 27In Between Shades of Gray, which dead animal do Lina and little Janina find and smuggle back to cook?
An owl
An owl, huge and lying dead on the ground, gives the starving hut a rare taste of meat. The camp's only medical help that winter is a veterinarian.
Q 28In Between Shades of Gray, barges carry Lina's family north to the Arctic along which great Siberian river?
The Lena
The Lena carries the barges past the Arctic Circle to its mouth, reached in late August with the air barely above freezing. No buildings are waiting for the deportees there.
Q 29In Between Shades of Gray, what is the truck carrying Lina's family waiting for outside a hospital?
A woman giving birth
A woman giving birth, Ona, is on the list too, and she is loaded aboard as soon as the cord is cut. The passengers had hoped the stop meant medical help for one of their own.
Q 30In Between Shades of Gray, what do the deportees call the hut they build from sticks, stones and moss in the Arctic?
A jurta
A jurta is all the group has against the polar winter, and a guard laughs when they ask for a stove. Meanwhile the men must build proper barracks and a bakery for the officers.