Between Shades of Gray: Chapter 78 Summary & Analysis

Christmas arrives, and the deportees are glad that they’ve made it through half the winter. While they freeze and starve, the guards enjoy sumptuous food and warm fires. Elena becomes even weaker. The lice bring typhus, and the man who repeats words quarantines himself in a jurta designated for the sick. Four days later, Lina sees his naked body, half-eaten by foxes, on a stack of corpses. In a flashback, Lina recalls Elena asking her to move her Munch book off of the dining table, since she finds the images ghastly. Yet despite the imagery of rotting bodies, Lina finds the work beautiful. Kostas tells her she is beautiful for seeing the work that way.

Back on the tundra, Lina is enraged that people are dying left and right. Mrs. Rimas says all they can do is pray. In the jurta, Elena tells Lina to apologize to Kretszky for saying she hated him. Elena reveals that he once helped her escape from near-rape by other guards. He drove her back to safety, and was punished for aiding her. That is why he was demoted to Trofimovsk. Lina still has no sympathy for him. Soon Elena grows very ill and is running a high fever. She complains of the cold, and they all huddle together for warmth.