Cilka

Cilka is 16 years old when she first enters Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942. Cilka’s Journey is a novel written by Heather Morris, the author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and it is the story of a young girl who all too soon becomes the victim of a corrupt political system that brutally incarcerated dissidents, as well as individuals whose ethnicity set them apart from the political system.

Cilka survives by doing whatever it takes to overcome her situation and circumstances. She is forced to prostitute herself in order to survive, a fact that is used against her by fellow detainees who are jealous of Cilka’s good looks and quick mind. Cilka survives, but her story could have ended much differently.

This is not an easy book to read because of the horrific experiences of the Gulags and what human beings were subjected to by the government of the USSR. According to Morris’s endnotes, “from 1929 until Stalin’s death in 1953, in excess of 18 million people passed through the Gulag system and they were from many countries, occupations, and faiths. Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was both a victim of the Gulag and a chronicler of the forced labor camps which are known as the Gulag Archipelago.” The Gulags were located in the most remote parts of the USSR and the living conditions were brutal.  Cilka survives and, surprisingly, thrives in the environment into which she has been thrust, including living in Vorkuta’s prison camps, the most brutal of all the Gulags.

Cilka’s story is hard to put down.  Her strength as an individual is amazing, and she shares that strength with other women who may not have otherwise survived their ordeal.  Cilka is a natural leader, very smart, and quite clever at turning adversity to her advantage. I recommend this book to any woman who wonders how she would survive the worst that life has to offer. We never know our strength until it is tested, and this novel is the ultimate test of not just mental fortitude, but physical ability to deal with the harshest of environments and survive.