Rating: 4/5
This is the inspiring and powerful true story that narrates the life of Cecilia “Cilka” Klein. After having survived three years at Auschwitz during World War II, Cilka is relieved when the concentration camp is liberated and she is set free. But the horrors of imprisonment are not over for Cilka. She has been wrongly accused of ‘collaborating’ with the Nazis during her time in Auschwitz, having supposedly worked as a prostitute. What really happened was that Cilka’s beauty had been noted by many of the high-ranking officials at the concentration camp, who had raped her almost every day and given her extra rations for it. These rations Cilka had distributed throughout the camp, and she always said afterwards—as did Lale Sokolov for being the Tatowierer—that she had felt immensely guilty with her ‘privileged job’. Nonetheless, the Russians who liberated the camp decided that she had been a collaborator, and sent her to the Vorkuta Gulag, ninety-nine miles above the Arctic Circle. She was only nineteen years old. Her sentence of fifteen years was cut off by her liberation in the late 1950s. In total, Cilka was to spend and survive nine years in the Gulag.
I enjoyed this book very much, and I agree with Lale Sokolov. Cilka Klein was the bravest woman I have ever heard of.
Here are a few extracts that described the living conditions in the Gulag:
“At night, prisoners used a ‘parasha’—a communal bucket—in place of a toilet. One prisoner wrote that in the morning the ‘parasha’ was “impossible to carry, so it was dragged along across the slippery floor. The contents invariably spilled out.” The stench made it “almost impossible to breathe.”
“Nearby was a mess hall, where prisoners were fed a daily soup of “spoiled cabbage and potatoes, sometimes with pieces of pig fat, sometimes with herring heads” or “fish or animal lungs and a few potatoes.”
“Escape was unthinkable. Some of the remoter camps had no barbed wire, so unlikely was the possibility of prisoners ever making it across hundreds of kilometres of wilderness to freedom. Those that did attempt to escape did so in threes—the third prisoner coming along as a “cow”—food for the other two in case they didn’t find any other nourishment.”