Salt to the Sea
Salt to the Sea
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Ruta Sepetys on Salt to the Sea
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A cousin who almost boardedThe book began with a confession delivered in person. After ‘Between Shades of Gray’ was published, Sepetys’s father’s cousin traveled from Europe to tell her about a ship whose death toll dwarfed the Titanic’s, a disaster that had been buried in Cold War silence for more than seven decades.
My father’s cousin told me that during World War II there was a ship that sank with a death toll far greater than the Titanic and Lusitania combined, yet the story had somehow remained hidden for over seventy years. The ship was the Wilhelm Gustloff and she had been granted passage on it during the evacuation.
That conversation left Sepetys with a question she could not answer from any library shelf: not simply what happened, but why entire populations had agreed, for decades, not to discuss it. The question became the engine of the book.
It made me wonder, what determines how history is preserved and recalled? Why do some parts of history become part of our collective consciousness while others remain hidden? That question inspired me to investigate and write Salt to the Sea.
Research in European museums gave Sepetys a physical object that made the human scale of the disaster concrete. Refugees fleeing the Soviet advance in January 1945 had dropped messages into bottles and thrown them from evacuation ships, sometimes without signing their names, with no certainty anyone would ever find them.
In writing Salt to the Sea, I came across the perfect example for why it should not be forgotten. When I was researching in museums, I saw these messages in bottles that had been thrown from these refugee ships during the evacuation. These people were desperate for someone, anyone to know their story, that they would write something, and in many cases not even sign it, and throw the story over board, hoping that it would land somewhere.
Those unsigned bottles gave her the book’s animating metaphor and its moral obligation: someone had to pick them up.
Suppression of the Gustloff story was not an accident of time. When Sepetys asked German interview subjects directly why the sinking had stayed hidden, she got an answer rooted in postwar guilt rather than Soviet censorship alone.
I think there’s a few contributing factors. I think, first of all, it was a German ship, and after the war, what the German people told me, they said that considering their atrocities during World War II, they felt it was inappropriate to position themselves as victims. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Six countries before the first sentenceBefore Sepetys wrote a line of fiction, she spent three years building a factual foundation. The research moved outward from books to boots on the ground: she walked the refugee route through what was formerly East Prussia and stood at the port of Gotenhafen where the Gustloff had departed.
I spent three years researching. I started by reading all of the non-fiction available on the topic. After I finished, I traveled to six different countries and interviewed historians, families, and survivors connected to the history. I also interviewed a few divers who had explored the sunken Gustloff. Their accounts were incredibly compelling.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Ruta Sepetys”The four-narrator structure of the novel, in which Lithuanian, East Prussian, Polish, and German voices take turns telling the same events, was not a late revision. It came directly from what those interviews kept revealing: that witnesses from different countries described the evacuation in terms that barely resembled each other.
I decided on the alternating structure well before I wrote a single word. As I was researching the sinking, evacuation, and time period, I was fascinated that the same event when described by people from different countries could be so drastically varied. But of course we all see history through our own cultural lens.
Writing the chapters in strict rotation, one narrator handing off to the next without Sepetys doubling back, kept the stakes visceral. She described to A.B. Westrick that the method also shaped her sentences at the line level, because each handoff had to land with enough force to pull a reader into a completely different consciousness.
I wrote Salt to the Sea sequentially, just as the reader reads it, swapping and alternating the voice in each chapter.
Alfred, the novel’s German narrator and its most disturbing voice, required Sepetys to understand the psychology of invisible young men who find identity in ideology. She researched Hitler’s adolescence, including his habit of writing long unsent letters and his difficult relationship with his father, and worked those details into Alfred’s character.
I think of Alfred as a study of visibility. What happens to a young man who is isolated, rejected, invisible for much of his life and then suddenly he is given a uniform and becomes visible…if only in his own mind?
Emilia, the young Polish narrator who carries the novel’s most quietly devastating secret, cost Sepetys the most emotionally. The challenge was not to make her merely tragic but to preserve her agency within conditions designed to strip it away.
The character of Emilia was hard to write, mainly because it was so heartbreaking. I wanted to capture a sense of vulnerability with Emilia but also position her as a heroic warrior.
Sepetys spent more than two decades in the music industry before she published fiction, and she carried one specific lesson from that career into the way she constructs prose sentences. She treats rhythm not as decoration but as a retention device.
Most people won’t remember anything I say in this interview, but if they hear a song they haven’t heard in several years, they can still sing the words to the song. And that’s because rhythm and melody make something memorable. So I try to weave rhythms into my prose.
The personal thread
A father’s nine years in the campsJoana, the novel’s Lithuanian nurse, carries an autobiographical weight that Sepetys was drawing from lived family history, not archival research. Her father’s experience as a refugee in postwar Germany gave her the emotional core of a character who must leave behind everything she has ever loved.
My father fled from Lithuania and lived for nine years in refugee camps before coming to the United States. And so with this character of Joana, I wanted to explore what is it like for a young person who is forced to leave everything they’ve ever known and loved behind?
Sepetys grew up in Michigan with a name that required constant explanation, but she did not understand what that name carried until a 2005 trip to Lithuania revealed that members of her grandfather’s family had been deported to Siberia after his escape. The gap between family story and family history sharpened the moral argument behind all her books.
I was shocked and ashamed that I knew nothing of this part of history that had affected my own family.
What she wants us to sit with
9,343 names waiting to be spokenWhen the book came out in February 2016, interviewers kept asking Sepetys about its timing relative to the Syrian refugee crisis. She said the overlap was coincidental. But the argument at the heart of the novel was one she had been working toward for years, and she stated it in terms that go beyond any single news cycle.
I want readers to understand that when struggle is acknowledged, you take a step towards restoring human dignity. We know how disastrous it is when we dehumanize people and refer to them as things or a collective thing. But when we recognize the struggle and the hardship, we’re using the most powerful gift we have, empathy, to tell someone, ‘I know this story. Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, I feel for you.’ And to say that to someone a half a world away that you’ve never met. That’s the power we have through books.
Sepetys has argued elsewhere that historical silence is not neutral. Left unfilled, it invites people to construct their own explanations, and those explanations are often wrong in ways that cause real harm.
I find that secrets and silence breed speculation and uncertainty. If we don’t know the full details of a story, the tendency is to fill in the blanks ourselves. But in doing so, we sometimes create false narratives and that can lead to unnecessary suspicion and confusion.
In a Penguin Teen video interview recorded around the book’s publication, Sepetys reduced her entire project to three sentences. The precision of the number, 9,343, is the point: she wants readers to resist the abstraction of mass death and reckon with individual lives.
9,343 people perished on the Wilhelm Gustloff. Each one had a story. Lift their bottles from the water. Please. Give them a voice. [paraphrased from audio]