Summary
Salt to the Sea begins in East Prussia in 1945. World War II is drawing to a chaotic close and hundreds of thousands of people from East Prussia, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and other countries are forced to flee their homes.
Joana is a refugee who left Lithuania in 1941. She is a kind, studious nurse who travels with a group of fifteen refugees through the former German territory of East Prussia. They must be careful not to be caught, since Adolf Hitler has not issued evacuation orders. Joana feels that guilt hunts her, and she is tormented by a voice that tells her that it’s all her fault.
Two days earlier, a young boy emerged from the forest and joined their group after his grandmother died. Now, he and Joana come upon a young woman who is frozen dead on the side of the road. Joana takes her identification papers to give to the Red Cross. Suddenly, they hear a bang in the distance.
Not far away, Florian, a young Prussian man of army age but in civilian clothes, tries to run for safety as planes buzz overhead. Florian feels fate hunting him. He has a wound on his side and is very concerned to protect the secret he bears: a mysterious, small box wrapped in cloth. Florian is also tormented by his conscience and wonders if his parents would consider him talented or a traitor.
Emilia, a fifteen-year-old Polish girl wearing a pink woolen cap, sees shame as her hunter. She is also on the run and is bleeding beneath her coat. She feels very tired and decides to rest in a potato cellar, but she soon realizes she isn’t alone there. A Russian soldier points his gun at her and yanks her ankle.
Florian also comes upon the cellar, and when he enters, he shoots the Russian soldier dead and Emilia faints. They decide to leave the cellar, and Florian wants to leave Emilia behind because she will slow him down. But in broken German she tearfully begs him not to leave her. He thinks of his younger sister, Anni, and decides to wait for her. Suddenly, Russian bombs fall nearby and they run.
Meanwhile, Alfred Frick, a seventeen-year-old German sailor stationed at the port of Gotenhafen in Poland, sees fear as a hunter. He imagines writing a letter to Hannelore, his love interest back home in Heidelberg. He tries to project an image of himself as brave and heroic. But when a bullet rings out he hides in a closet. An officer scolds him and sends him to the port to receive an assignment.
All the while, Joana continues down the road with the group of refugees, including a blind girl named Ingrid and an old shoemaker, known as the shoe poet because he talks about shoes with great love and emotion. They hear planes overhead. At night the group takes shelter in an abandoned barn and Joana treats blisters, wounds, and frostbite.
Later, Florian and Emilia also find the barn. Joana tries to talk to Florian; he thinks she is pretty but tries to avoid conversation. Joana can tell that Florian is hiding a wound but he is reluctant to accept medical care. Emilia also rejects care for whatever is ailing her. Eva, a giant woman in her fifties, reluctantly speaks Polish with Emilia. She learns Emilia is from Lwów and that her father sent her to East Prussia for safety.
After everyone else goes to sleep, Florian accepts medical care from Joana. He has a fever and a serious shrapnel wound. He would like to tell Joana his name but cannot risk revealing his identity. Emilia tries to help but Florian tells her to go away. Joana asks her to go outside to look for a stick for Florian to bite down on.
Analysis
Ruta Sepetys’s third novel takes place in January of 1945. Historical context is important throughout the novel. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, with the goal of conquering its resources and repopulating the area with Germans. In the years that followed, the Soviet Union, with the support of western Allied Forces, resisted Axis attacks. By 1945, Russia and the Allies attacked Germany, which finally surrendered in May of 1945.
Sepetys emphasizes that throughout the war, both Germany and Russia “committed unspeakable atrocities, not only against each other, but against innocent civilians in their path.” This was especially true in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics. The refugees in Salt to the Sea represent some of these innocent civilians.
The story weaves constantly between the differing points of view of four young narrators: Joana, a Lithuanian nurse; Florian, an East Prussian restoration artist; Emilia, a fifteen-year-old Polish orphan; and Alfred, a nervous Nazi sailor. This narrative structure highlights both the differences and the similarities between the narrators’ experiences. Under the Nazis’ racist ideology, each character’s fate is determined by their identity. For example, Emilia is seen as subhuman and she is persecuted for being Polish. Joana is Lithuanian but she is able to repatriate to Germany because her mother has German roots. Meanwhile, as an East Prussian, Florian is expected to fight in the Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces. Alfred, on the other hand, is German and according to the Nazis belongs to a “master race.”
The refugees are uneasy about the presence of Florian and Emilia, because both could mean danger for them: Emilia because she is persecuted for being Polish, and Florian because they assume he is an army deserter. Joana, on the other hand, expresses sympathy for the fellow refugees and exasperation with the “German Only” attitude of some in her group.
At the same time, Sepetys draws attention to the similarities between the narrators’ experiences. She does this through the parallelism of the novel’s opening sections, which repeat the motifs of the “bang” and the hunter. Each narrator’s opening section ends with the “bang” of gunshots or artillery. Despite their differences, all of the characters are in danger and afraid of death. They are all forced to leave their families and homes in the face of war.
Each narrator also bears a heavy burden and feels hunted by his or her emotions: Joana by guilt, Florian by fate, Emilia by shame, and Alfred by fear. Sepytys uses the metaphor of the hunter to show how the narrators feel persecuted by their feelings and secrets.
From the beginning of the novel, metaphors and personification indicate that emotions are just as powerful as physical suffering. For example, when Florian is running from nearby air attacks, his legs feel weak and slow, not only because he is tired, but also because his “conscience [was] noosed around [his] ankles.” When the group of refugees stops to rest in an abandoned barn, Joana treats their physical ailments. But she reminds us that she “had no treatment for what plagued people most. Fear.”
In this first part of the novel, we also meet the "shoe poet," and he accurately predicts Joana’s character according to her boots: she comes from a wealthy family, she was loved, and she is sad due to being separated from her mother. Shoes are an important symbol throughout the novel. They represent a person’s deeper character, since the shoe poet contends that “the shoes always tell the story.”
