CILKA'S JOURNEY by Heather Morris

 

A story of survival and what one does to keep on living. There is no choice really, other than to say yes and do as your are told. At times it must be so bad that you wish you were actually dead. But that deep seated fight to live just won't let you give up. So many harrowing stories, all based on some sort of fact, about the concentration camps of WWII set up and brutally, inhumanely, sadisitically managed by the Nazis. And Josef Stalin, that crazy Georgian whacko with his paranoia resulting in the infamous gulags of Siberia. We can't even begin to imagine the horror, relying on the imagination of writers and their sometimes good  luck to either be a survivor or be close to a survivor. 

Cilka is a survivor, and hopefully you read The Tattooist of Auschwitz by the same author before reading this. Cilka is in Auschwitz with the tattooist and others in that story. She features in the story, but is not a lead character. The author has now made this book all about her. The Tattooist is sold as fiction based on a true story, and for me, there was a real feel that it was biographical in the way it was written. The author had numerous meetings with the subject, and it felt real, authentic when I was reading it. She admits that for Cilka, very little was known about her life after the war - the one known fact being that she was sent to Siberia for so-called collaboration during her time in Auschwitz. The author has made Cilka's  story up based on the real stories of many, many other men and women also sent to Siberia like her. This, for me, made the book feel like a work of fiction, which made it difficult for me to relate to Cilka as a real person. 

What the book did have though was 26 pages at the back of commentary from the author sharing the information she did have about Cilka and her family, plus what happened when she was finally released from the gulag. There is also a history of the gulag programme and what it would have been like to live there from Owen Matthews, an expert in this area. These sections made the book more alive for me, and I read these before starting the novel. 

Despite me not engaging with it as much as I wanted to, this is an amazing story. Sentenced to Siberia for 15 years? No thank you very much, not then, not now. What a horrific existence. And yet the men and women sentenced somehow manage to survive and make a life. Terrible things happen, life is brutal, basic, mean, either freezing cold, or crazy hot. They are always hungry, tired, often ill. Cilka has a few strokes of luck which make her years in the gulag bearable. And it is a great story, uplifting, hopeful, interesting and challenged characters. I really did like it, but following on from The Tattooist, it just wasn't of quite the same calibre.