A really good read - Cilka's Journey
This week has marked the 75 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, so it seems a fitting time to recommend this intensely powerful, moving, yes harrowing but also heart-soaring book, Clika’s Journey.
I read Cilka’s Journey whilst I was on holiday in the Philippines
If you have already read Heather Morris’s previous best-selling book, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, (and if you haven’t it would be impossible for me to recommend you do more urgently), you may recognise the name of the title character of this extraordinary story.
An astonishingly brave heroine
Cilka Klein was just sixteen when she was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. What she endures there - which you learn through flashback passages in this book - and how her bravery, inner-strength and selflessness enables her to not only survive but help other prisoners in the camp, forms part of the story of the Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Cilka’s beauty catches the attention of the camp Commandant who separates her from the other women and abuses her in the worst possible way. Through her wits, courage and iron-strong will, Cilka learns how to negotiate and use her unwanted position to help the other prisoners as best she can.
Where her story starts
Cilka’s Journey picks up her story from the moment she and the other surviving prisoners are liberated in January 1945. But if you imagine that you’ll be reading about how she rebuilds her life back in her native Czechoslovakia, think again.
Because Cilka is charged as a collaborator by the Russians and sentenced to 15 years in a brutal, desolate prison camp just inside the Arctic Circle in Siberia. Once again this extraordinary young woman has to find a way to survive horrifyingly familiar hardship, and terrible depravation.
Hard to read, harder to put down
I realise this hardly sounds like a cheery book, and certainly there are times when Cilka’s Journey is a tough read, but it’s also equally tough to put down. Because through it all, this astonishing young woman’s strength of character, her remarkable resilience and her unfailing selflessness, keep you gripped to every page, willing her on in her fight to survive the dreadful, unjust horror of her situation.
And (not a spoiler) survive is what she does. Thanks to the support of a woman doctor in the hospital block where she ends up working, the combination of her fierce intelligence, work ethic and (despite everything) deep-seated caring nature which make her a natural and first-rate nurse, and an unexpected encounter which changes everything for her (revealing that definitely would be a spoiler).
A mix of fact and fiction
Cikla’s Journey author, Heather Morris, wrote the Tattooist of Auschwitz as a result of meeting the eponymous hero of that story and talking to him over a period of three years. She never had the chance to meet Cilka, who died before she started researching her story. But like so many people who read the first book, she desperately wanted to know what happened to the brave, beautiful young girl who survived against such unimaginable odds.
Cilka’s Journey is a novel woven together by a combination of fact and fiction. Heather has created characters based on what she discovered from her research - into Cilka and her family, and what life was like in the Siberian prison camps. In doing so, she brings us a gripping, intensely powerful story of the ability of the human spirit to survive even in the most horrifying of circumstances.
What a woman
In one of her conversations with Lale Sokolov, the Tattooist of Auschwitz, about his time in the camp, Lale asked Heather a question:
“Did I tell you about Cilka?” he said.
“No, you didn’t” she replied.
“She was the bravest person I ever met. Not the bravest girl; the bravest person.”
Reading Cilka’s Journey it’s hard to disagree.
What recommendations do you have for my next read?
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