MarilynW's Reviews > Cilka's Journey

Cilka's Journey (The Tattooist of Auschwitz #2) by Heather Morris

I did not mean take so long to finally read this Advanced Read Copy but once I received it, I felt very uncomfortable tackling a book about the Holocaust. Finally I read a couple of books that touched on the Holocaust and felt ready to read this book. But first, I read The Tattooist of Auschwitz, as my introduction to this book. After The Tattooist of Auschwitz, I wanted to know what happened to Cilka, after the liberation of the concentration camp, in 1945.  I read this book as historical fiction, with the emphasis on fiction, because so little was really known about Cilka and there are so many articles that discuss conflicting information about Cilka, her actions and even her existence. 

Having said all of that, I enjoyed this book despite it's gruesome subject matter. Cilka, of this story and the first one, survived the concentration camp by not fighting back with her captors. She was raped regularly by officers high in the chain of command and because they had "claimed" her, she was in charge of Block 25, the barracks where the women who were going into the gas chambers slept one more night, before being loaded into the trucks to be driven to their deaths. When the camps were liberated, Cilka was sentenced to 15 years in a Siberian gulag, for sleeping with the enemy but her role as the head of Block 25 was the role that haunted her even more than the fact she didn't fight back while being raped. 

Once at the gulag, Cilka tries to remain unseen, unnoticed but she quickly is chosen by a powerful prisoner to be his property, so she is once again raped regularly but safe from the gang rapes that happened to other women. Cilka's knowledge of many languages and her ability to learn quickly also kept her from hard labor because she was chosen to work with the doctors and nurses in the prisoner medical facility. Always, Cilka remembered her life and role at Auschwitz and feared that her fellow prisoners would find out about her former life. But the memory of her former life also drove her to do all she could to help her fellow inmates. 

The real live Soviet gulags were as bad as the Nazi concentration camps, even if they didn't have the gas chambers, ovens, and medical experiments. The prisoners were slaves, to be starved and worked to death and replaced by more slaves, there were always more bodies to replace those that fell. I'd been unaware of the details of places like this and now I know about one more historical horror. Cilka's Journey is a moving story and I'm glad I read it. 

Pub October 1, 2019

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for this ARC.