• Everytime Lina is distressed or scared she repeats the words of her mother, 

“Don’t give them anything, Lina. Not even your fear”(Sepetys 312). 

• She yells at Krezsetzy, a soilder, on how she hates him, even though he can kill her. Shows how she isn't scared and brave. 

• Lina is devoted to having her family be complete again and finding her father. She goes through many life taking risks, including leaving behind drawings and wordings, hopping off the train to find her father in one of the carts, and getting a hold of a file from the general’s desk. 
• She repeats to herself that she wants to live, 

"she doesn’t want to go die"(Sepetys 319). 

• As Lina eventually is forcefully a part of that community she shows signs of her hobbies and traditions from prior to being a prisoner. In each chapter we can see she continues to draw throughout the story and making that a key point in her identity. 
• Even when in the camp, with an incomplete family, and barely any food, some people there gathered together and had dinner together. Keeping the tradition of Lina’s home country,

 “Lithuanian tradition called for an empty place to be left at the table for family members who were gone or deceased…Lina[I] gently set the[our] family photo at the empty setting”(Sepetys, 206).

• Setting: Kaunas, Lithuania, Arctic Circle, and Siberia, Russia and it goes through the period of 1941. 
• Important Characters:Lina, Jonas, Andrius, Mother, Father, the bald man, Mrs. Arvydas, Miss Gybas, Ona, and Kretszky.
•  Background Info: World War Two is beginning to happen and the Soviet Union is conquering other countries and arresting people in them. They take them into concentration camps and treat them disrespectfully, barely feed, abuse, kill, and work them. 

• Lina and her family are forced out of their home, arrested, and put on trains to an unknown location by the NKVD. Her dad being the only one separated from her family, leaving her mother her brother, Jonas, and herself. 

• Lina and her family, Miss Gybas, the bald man, and more people were sent to another prison camp in the Arctic Circle. Leaving Andius and his mother, Mrs. Alvydas. They go into a harsher climate, barely any food or water, not seeing the sun for half of the year, and not even a house to live in. This is the climax because this was when Lina goes face to face against the Soviets, as they pressure her and everyone else to die, making it almost impossible for survival.