I searched testimonies of other survivors for reference to Cilka. I found them. Did they bring me comfort? No, they did not. I found conflicting comments such as: she did bad things to survive; she gave me extra rations when she found out I came from the same town as her; she yelled and screamed at the condemned women; she smuggled me food when I was certain I would die of hunger.
A picture of a very young woman surviving in a death camp, submitting herself to the sexual advances of not one but two senior SS officers, was emerging. A story of bravery, compassion, friendship; a story, like Lale’s, where you did what you did in order to survive. Only the consequences for Cilka were to be imprisoned for another ten years in the coldest place on earth—Vorkuta Gulag, inside the Arctic Circle, Siberia.
With the release of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, floods of emails and messages arrived from around the world. The vast majority of them asked the question, “What happened to Cilka?”
With the support of my editors and publishers I began the research that would lead me to uncovering the story that has inspired this novel.
I engaged a professional researcher in Moscow to uncover details of life in Vorkuta—the Gulag where Cilka spent ten years.
I traveled to Košice, and at the invitation of the owners of the apartment where Cilka and her husband had lived for fifty years, I sat surrounded by the four walls Cilka called home. The owner told me she felt Cilka’s presence in the apartment for many months after she moved in.
I sat and talked to her neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Samuely, both in their nineties. They shared stories of living next door to Cilka and her husband for many decades.
I met another neighbor who shared the name Klein. He told me he and Cilka were the only Jewish people in the building. They would speak softly together on significant Jewish days of celebration. They shared a hope that they might one day visit Israel. Neither ever did, he said.
At the town cemetery I visited the graves of Cilka and her husband and paid my respects, placed flowers, lit a candle.
With translators and one of my publishers, I traveled to Sabinov, an hour’s drive north of Košice, where we got to see the birth extracts of Cilka and her sisters (see the Additional Information below for details).
We were shown the marriage certificate of her parents and learned the names of her grandparents.
In Bardejov, where Cilka and her family had lived and were transported from, we read reports from the school Cilka and her sisters attended. They all were rated excellent for behavior and manners. Cilka shone in both mathematics and sports.
I wandered through the streets of the old town. Stood outside the home where Cilka once lived, ran my hand along the remnants of the city wall that protected the residents for hundreds of years from invading enemies, unable to protect Cilka from the request to submit to the Nazis. Such a beautiful place, a peaceful place—in 2019.
I am comforted by the knowledge Cilka spent nearly five decades with the man she loved and, according to her friends and neighbors, had a good life. Mrs. Samuely told me how Cilka would talk about her love for her husband with the female friends in their circle. She would be teased by the other women, who did not share such passionate feelings of love toward their husbands.
When writing of the rape, yes, there is no other word for it, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found very little documented in the filmed testimonies. What I did find were papers written more recently when female interviewers spoke to survivors about this subject. How they uncovered the deep shame these women had lived with for many decades, never speaking of the abuse, never being asked the question, “Were you ever sexually assaulted by the Nazis?” The shame is ours, not theirs. They lived for decades with the truth, the reality of what happened to them, buried deep within.
Time is up. It is time these crimes of rape and sexual abuse are called out for what they were. Crimes often denied as they were not “official Nazi policy.” I found specific mention even of Schwarzhuber as a “smirking lecher” (from a female inmate physician) and I have read, in one testimony: “it was rumored she [Cilka] received [SS Unterscharführer Taube].” While millions of Jewish men, women and children died, many lived and carried the burden of their suffering, too ashamed to mention it to their families, their partners. To deny it happened is to stick your head in the sand. Rape is a long-established weapon of war and oppression. Why should the Nazis, one of the most vicious regimes the world has ever known, forswear this particular form of cruelty?
I was humbled to have Lale Sokolov in my life for three years and to hear his story firsthand. I did not have this luxury with Cilka. Determined to tell her story, to honor her, I found a way to weave the facts and reportage of her circumstances in both Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Vorkuta Gulag with the testimonies of others, particularly women. To navigate the fictional and factual elements required to create a novel, I created characters based on what I discovered through reading and research into what life was like in these camps. There is a mix of characters inspired by real-life figures, in some instances representing more than one individual, and characters completely imagined. There are more characters based on real-life figures in the Auschwitz-Birkenau sections, as I learned about them from Lale.
History never gives up its secrets easily. For over fifteen years I’ve been finding out about the amazing lives of ordinary people under the most unimaginable of circumstances. It’s a journey that’s taken me from the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, to the streets of Israel. From small towns in the hills of Slovakia to the railroad tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the buildings beyond. I’ve spoken to people who lived through those terrible days. I’ve spoken to their family and friends. I’ve seen meticulous records from Yad Vashem and the Shoah Foundation and handwritten documents in civil archives dating back to the nineteenth century. They all paint a picture, but sometimes that picture isn’t clear and often the details don’t all line up. The challenge of working with history is to find the core of what was true and the spirit of those who lived then.
Days before Cilka’s Journey was due to go to the printers, new facts were uncovered concerning her parents. They didn’t relate to her time in the Nazi or Soviet camps, but they did shed new light on this remarkable woman and where she came from. It was a reminder to me that the story of Cilka’s journey is far from fully told, even with the book you hold in your hands.
Stories like Cilka’s deserve to be told, and I’m humbled and honored to bring it to you. She was just a girl, who became a woman, who was the bravest person Lale Sokolov ever met.
Additional Information
Cecilia “Cilka” Klein was born in Sabinov, eastern Slovakia, on March 17, 1926. Her mother was Fany Kleinova, née Blechova, her father, Miklaus Klein (b. January 13, 1895). Cilka was the youngest of three daughters of Miklaus. Olga was born to Miklaus and Cecilia Blechova (b. September 19, 1897) on December 28, 1921. It appears that Cecilia Blechova died on March 26, 1922, and that Miklaus then married Cecilia’s sister, Fany Blechova (b. May 10, 1903), on November 1, 1923. Miklaus and Fany had two daughters, Magdalena, “Magda,” born August 23, 1924, and Cecilia, “Cilka,” and Fany would also have raised Olga as her own daughter. Cilka was named for her aunt, and Olga was both her and Magda’s cousin and their half-sister. In the fictional narrative, Cilka’s sisters are represented as one character, Magda.
On the registry of birth for each of the girls, Miklaus is listed as “non-domiciled,” meaning that he was Hungarian. Czechoslovakia was created at the end of the First World War, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist, and eastern Slovakia sat on the border of this newly created nation and Hungary. Miklaus Klein was born in the northern Hungarian town of Szikszó, 100 miles south of Sabinov. Miklaus was never during his life regarded as a Czechoslovakian citizen.
At some point before 1931 the family moved to Bardejov, where each of the girls attended the local school. The family are known to have lived in Klastorska Street and Halusova Street. Miklaus’s occupations on his d
aughters’ birth certificates and their school records vary wildly—he is a salesman, a tradesman, an industrial business employee and latterly a driver. It seems that he worked for a Mr. Rozner in Bardejov, possibly as his driver.
When the Second World War broke out, Germany annexed what is now the Czech Republic. Hungary sided with the Germans and what is now Slovakia capitulated. While people at this time would have still identified themselves in an official context as Czechoslovakian, the country was divided in two and Hungary also took control of an area in the southeast. This meant that the fate of the Jewish people of Czechoslovakia varied according to which part of the country they were living in. The Jews of Hungary were sent to the camps in 1944.
In survivor testimonies, people from the area often refer to themselves as “Slovakian” or “Slovak,” and so in the narrative I have used both Czechoslovakia and Slovakia/Slovak depending on official or personal context. Likewise, people from the Czech region might identify themselves as “Czech.” And Slovakian and Czech were, and are, separate (but very similar) languages. Both are West Slavic languages and are closely related to Polish. When visiting Cilka’s hometown of Bardejov I learned that she would also have understood Russian, through exposure to the Rusyn dialect.
In 1942, the Nazis set about rounding up the Jews of the region of Slovakia. All Jewish people in Bardejov were ordered to go to Poprad. From there they were put into cattle wagons bound for Auschwitz. Miklaus and the three girls entered Auschwitz on April 23, 1942, where Cilka was given prisoner number 5907. There is no record of Fany Kleinova having gone to Auschwitz, but witness testimonies, and Lale Sokolov, describe Cilka having seen her mother put on the death cart at Birkenau. In reality they most likely all left Bardejov on the same date and waited in Poprad for transports. Cilka’s occupation at the time of her entry to Auschwitz is listed as “tailor,” her older sisters are “housewives.” In the novel, I have imagined the daughters going earlier than their parents, as this happened in many instances, where each Jewish family was ordered to send able-bodied young people (over the age of sixteen) to go and work.
The entire family, bar Cilka and her mother, are listed on the Yad Vashem Archive as having been murdered in the Shoah. We do not know when Miklaus, Fany, Magda and Olga were murdered, but we do know that only Cilka survived Auschwitz. (In one record I have uncovered, Cilka too is listed as having been murdered in Auschwitz, but this is also the case with Lale Sokolov, and we know that both survived and made it back to Czechoslovakia.)
At the end of the war the Russians liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, and it seems that at this point Cilka was taken to Montelupich Prison in Kraków, possibly after going through an NKVD filtration/interrogation point (this has been simplified in the novel) where she was given a sentence for collaboration, which I understand is because of her role in Block 25, and being pointed out as having “slept with the enemy.” This is how Lale understood it.
From there she made the long, arduous journey to Vorkuta in the Arctic Circle. Certain aspects of her time there I have taken from reportage: her job in the hospital; being taken under the wing of a female doctor; going out on the ambulance. Alexei Kukhtikov and his wife are loosely based on real people. Kukhtikov was director of both of Vorkuta’s prison camps, Vorkutlag and Rechlag, and during his time there commissioned the building of a children’s hospital (built by prisoners, of course).
Upon her release, I believe Cilka was sent to either Ruzyne or Pankrác Prison in Prague, before eventually returning to Czechoslovakia. There is an entry on her birth certificate in 1959 granting her Czechoslovakian citizenship. Cilka was back home, and life with a man she loved, whom she met in the Gulag, could begin. Alexandr is an entirely fictional creation, and I have not included the name of the man she met in Vorkuta and subsequently married in order to protect the privacy of his descendants. Cilka and her husband settled in Košice, where Cilka lived until her death on July 24, 2004. They never had children, but those I have met who knew them spoke of their great love for one another.
—Heather Morris, October 2019
AFTERWORD
Vorkuta—the White Hell
by Owen Matthews
Cilka’s last sight of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp would have been of the wrought-iron sign erected over the gates: Arbeit Macht Frei—“Work Brings Freedom.” The first thing she would have seen on her arrival in the Soviet Gulag camp at Vorkuta was another sign: “Work in the USSR is a matter of Honor and Glory.” Another declared that “With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness.” A taste for sadistic irony was just one of the many traits that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR shared.
Both Hitler’s concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag existed for the same purpose—to purge society of its enemies, and to extract as much work from them as possible before they died. The only real differences are ones of scale—Stalin’s Gulag was far larger than anything Hitler ever conceived—and of efficiency. Stalin certainly shared Hitler’s genocidal tendencies, condemning entire ethnic groups, such as the Chechens, Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, to mass deportation, death marches and forced labor. But where the Germans used Zyklon-B poison gas, Stalin preferred to let cold, hunger and overexertion do their lethal work.
Over 18 million people passed through the Gulag system from 1929 until Stalin’s death in 1953, according to the Soviet State’s own meticulous records. Of those, modern scholars estimate that some 6 million died either in prison or shortly after their release. Like Hitler’s concentration camps, Stalin’s Gulag housed both political prisoners and common criminals—as well as people condemned for belonging to politically unreliable nations, such as Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, or to the wrong class, whether wealthy peasants or pre-Revolutionary aristocrats. In the closing days of the Second World War the Gulag population was swelled by German war criminals and ordinary German prisoners of war, as well as hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers who had chosen surrender over death and were therefore presumed to be collaborators with the enemy. During Cilka’s time in Vorkuta her fellow prisoners included the commander of Germany’s Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Anton Kaindl; famous Yiddish, French and Estonian writers; Russian art scholars and painters; Latvian and Polish Catholic priests; East German Liberal Democrats and even a British soldier who had fought with the Waffen-SS British Free Corps. Alongside the intellectuals and war criminals was a large population of murderers, rapists and even convicted cannibals.
Nobel Prize–winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag’s most famous victim and its most dedicated chronicler, described Stalin’s system of forced labor camps as the Gulag Archipelago. The word is appropriate, as the camps spread across the Soviet Union’s eleven time zones like a string of interconnected islands. There were Gulags in Russia’s biggest cities, some housing German prisoners of war serving as slave laborers, and others where imprisoned engineers and scientists toiled in high-tech prison laboratories. But most Gulags were located in the remotest corners of the Siberian north and in the far east—indeed, whole swathes of the USSR were effectively colonized by State prisoners who built dozens of brand-new cities, roads, railways, dams and factories where there had previously been just bleak wasteland.
Vorkuta was such a colony, both in the sense of a penal settlement and a tiny island of life in a hostile, unexplored territory. In the late 1920s, Soviet geologists identified vast coal deposits in the frozen taiga wilderness, an area too cold for trees to grow, where the Pechora River flowed into the Arctic Sea. The region was some 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) north of Moscow and 160 kilometers (99 miles) above the Arctic Circle. Soviet secret police lost no time in arresting a leading Russian geologist, Nikolai Tikhonovich, and setting him to work organizing an expedition to sink the first mine in the area. In the early summer of 1931, a team of twenty-three men set off northward from Ukhta by boat. Prisoner-geologists led the way, ordinary prisoners manned the oars, and a small secret police contingent was in command. Paddling and marching thro
ugh the swarms of insects that inhabit the tundra in summer months, the party built a makeshift camp. “The heart compressed at the sight of the wild, empty landscape,” recalled one of the prisoner-specialists, a geographer named Kulevsky. “The absurdly large, black, solitary watchtower, the two poor huts, the taiga and the mud.” The beleaguered group somehow survived their first winter, when temperatures often fell to forty degrees below zero and the sun did not rise above the horizon for the four-month-long polar night. In the spring of 1932, they sank the first mine at Vorkuta, using only picks and shovels and wooden carts.
Stalin’s Purges—the mass arrests of suspect Party members and of politically unreliable wealthy peasants—began in 1934 and provided the mass of slave labor needed to turn this desolate site into a major industrial center. By 1938, the new settlement contained 15,000 prisoners and had produced 188,206 tons of coal. Vorkuta had become the headquarters of Vorkutlag, a sprawling network of 132 separate labor camps that covered over 90,000 square kilometers—an area larger than Ireland. By 1946, when Cilka arrived, Vorkutlag housed 62,700 inmates and was known as one of the largest and toughest camps in the entire Gulag system. An estimated 2 million prisoners passed through Vorkuta’s camps between 1931 and 1957—an estimated 200,000 of them perished from disease, overwork, and malnourishment in the Arctic conditions.
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