Cilka’s Journey by Heather Morris

Cilka’s Journey by Heather Morris

ARC courtesy of St. Martin’s Press and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Book Blurb:

Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, in 1942. The Commandant at Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair, and forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival. After liberation, Cilka is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to Siberia. But what choice did she have? And where did the lines of morality lie for Cilka, who was sent to Auschwitz when still a child?  In a Siberian prison camp, Cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, including the unwanted attention of the guards. But when she makes an impression on a woman doctor, Cilka is taken under her wing. Cilka begins to tend to the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under brutal conditions. Cilka finds endless resources within herself as she daily confronts death and faces terror. And when she nurses a man called Ivan, Cilka finds that despite everything that has happened to her, there is room in her heart for love.

My Review: 4 stars

Click here to order on Amazon

Cilka’s Journey was another intense fictionalized telling of a Holocaust survivor, Cilka Klein, whose story should be shared and never forgotten.

This book is quite different from the author’s previous work, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which also received great acclaim. In the first book, the story is told based on the multiple interviews the author had with the actual tattooist in Auschwitz. The interviews were intended to develop a screenplay, but instead, were used to create a fabulous novel. Although it was fictionalized, it was loaded with facts from the author’s conversations with the survivor. In this book, the story differs as it is heavy on the fictionalization with less factual information, although anything of truth came from tireless research.

Cilka was a fascinating woman who lived through hell and back. Being pretty was a double-edged sword in this novel. Cilka Stein’s good looks saved her as she entered Auschwitz at the young age of sixteen, but it also put in her in the hands of Commander Schwarzhuber, who steals her innocence in exchange for her life. Her time there was nothing but horrific, yet Morris does a good job of sharing what happened with just enough detail to ‘get it’, rather than spelling it all out.

Cilka manages to survive Auschwitz, only to learn that she is now considered a traitor for “sleeping with the enemy”, so she is sent to the Gulag (labor camp) in Sibera. It’s hard to imagine that she could survive both camps and still have her sanity and heart intact. Sadly, her story is not unfamiliar. The author learned of Cilka after interviewing Lale Sokolov for her first book. If anything, this story should be a reminder to the reader that hate is the spark that ignites evil, and to use the past as a blatant reminder to never let this happen again.

Quotes I liked:

It’s time to live now, Cilka,” he says. “Without fear, and with the miracle of love.” “Is that a poem?” she asks him, smiling through her tears. “It is the beginning of one.” 

“His eyes seem to see nothing. He is a man whose soul has died and whose body is waiting to catch up with it.”