Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris

Published: October 2019, St Martin's Press

Genre: fiction

Themes: imprisonment, siberia, gulag, endurance

My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤

Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris is one of those books you pick up with trepidation for fear of what horror may be contained within the pages. Novels based on true stories of unimaginable cruelty are always going to be difficult to read, but it is still important that the truth is told in the hope that we can prevent such things happening again.

The book follows the true story of Cilka Klein as she is moved from Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp into post-war imprisonment in Vorkuta Gulag, Siberia, at the age of eighteen. She has already spent three years in Auschwitz and has survived by working as a guard in one of the huts where women spend their final hours before entering the gas chambers. At the end of the war, when the Russians liberate the camp, she is sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag for assisting and sleeping with the enemy.

Her experiences in the concentration camp are interwoven with the story of her life in the gulag, so the reader can understand how this very young woman has been able to survive so long under the harshest of conditions. As well as documenting the terrible hardships, Heather Morris shows us how Cilka's acts of kindness and self sacrifice bring her through the years of her sentence without breaking her spirit, and how her actions affect the lives of others.

The writing gives us all the detail we need to know without dwelling unnecessarily on the suffering of others, and the story explores the concept of hope and the determination to survive under the worst possible circumstances.

2020 has been the seventy fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau so the publication of this book in 2019 will have provided further information to younger generations seeking to understand more about the holocaust. It is well told, and uncomplicated, and part of a bigger story that we must never forget.

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