anyone else in this café.
First Cilka asks about Lale, and is delighted to hear
about how he and Gita found each other in Bratislava
after the war, what they went through after that, and how
they have settled in Australia. Gita only stops smiling when
she says that they have been trying a long time for a baby,
with no success. She touches her stomach, reflexively,
under the table, as she says this.
‘Alexandr and I, too, have had no success,’ Cilka says,
reaching out to clutch her friend’s other hand.
And then, working backwards, Gita asks – voice
lowered, huddling in closer – if Cilka would like to talk
about the Gulag.
‘It is where I met Alexandr,’ Cilka says, ‘and made other
friends too.’ It is too hard to articulate the relentless bone-chilling cold, the constant flow of sick and injured and
dead prisoners, the rapes she again endured, the humili-
ation and pain of being imprisoned there, after the other place.
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‘Cilka,’ Gita says. ‘I don’t know how you could bear it.
After everything we’d already been through.’
Cilka lets the tears run down her cheeks. She never
speaks about this with anyone. No one around her, except
Alexandr, knows she was in Auschwitz, except for her
only Jewish neighbour who had been hidden as a little
boy all throughout the Shoah. And few people know she
was in Siberia. She has done her best to put the past
behind her, create a new life.
‘I know the people who came in after us, to Birkenau,
they just didn’t understand what it had been like, to be
there for so long.’ Gita continues to hold Cilka’s hand.
‘You were sixteen, and you had lost everything.’
‘We were faced only with impossible choices,’ Cilka says.
The sun shines in through the café window. The past
is seen through a muted grey light – cold, and never as
far away as they’d like. The images and smells are near
the surface of their skin. Every moment of loss.
But they turn their faces to the sun coming in.
Gita brings the conversation back to Lale, to their busi-
ness ventures, and to the Australian Gold Coast where
they holiday. She spoons cake into her mouth, closing her
eyes with pleasure, the way Alexandr still does when he
smokes or eats. And Cilka joins in, talking of the present,
of living.
They lift their glasses and toast, ‘ L’Chaim. ’
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NOTE FROM HEATHER MORRIS
‘Did I tell you about Cilka?’
‘No, Lale, you didn’t. Who was Cilka?’
‘She was the bravest person I ever met. Not the bravest
girl; the bravest person.’
‘And?’
‘She saved my life. She was beautiful, a tiny little thing,
and she saved my life.’
A brief conversation, a few words thrown at me one
day while I was talking to Lale about his time in Auschwitz-
Birkenau as the Tattooist of Auschwitz.
I returned to the topic of Cilka many times with Lale.
I held his hand as he explained to me how she saved his
life and what she did to be in a position to save his life.
He was distraught remembering, and I was shocked. This
was a girl who was sixteen years of age. Just sixteen. I
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became captivated by Cilka, unable to understand or comprehend the strength someone of her age must have
had to survive the way she did. And why did she have to
be punished so harshly for choosing to live?
I listened to Gita on her Shoah tape talking about Cilka
(though she does not use her name), the roles she had in
the camp, including in Block 25, and how Gita felt she
was judged unjustly. ‘I knew the girl who was the block
alteste. She lives now in Košice. Everyone says she was this and she was that, but she only had to do what the
SS told her. If Mengele told her this person has to go to
Block 25, she would take her in, you know? She couldn’t
cope with so many people. But those people don’t under-
stand who haven’t been there the whole time. And didn’t
go through the stages of what’s going on. So they say, one
was bad, one was good, but this I told you – you save
one, and the other one had to suffer. Block 25, you
couldn’t get out anybody.’ She also mentioned how she
had visited her ‘after’ in Košice, and Lale also told me
that she had.
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 smug-
gled 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
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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 conse-
quences 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, 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 travelled 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 neighbours 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 neighbour 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 signifi-
cant Jewish days of celebration. They shared a hope that
they might one day visit Israel. Neither ever did, he said.
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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 travelled
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 excel-
lent for behaviour and manners. Cilka shone in both
mathematics and sport.
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 neighbours, 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 towards their husbands.
When writing of the rape, yes there is no other word
for it, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found very little
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documented in the filmed testimonies. What I did find were papers written more recently when female inter-viewers 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 were 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 rumoured 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 hear his story first hand. I did not have this
luxury with Cilka. Determined to tell her story, to honour
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.
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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 circum-
stances. 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 meticu-
lous 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
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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 honoured to bring it to you. She was just a girl, who
became a woman, who was the bravest person Lale Sokolov
ever met.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Cecilia ‘Cilka’ Klein was born in Sabinov, eastern
Kleinova, née Blechova, her father Miklaus Klein (b. 13
January 1895). Cilka was the youngest of three daughters
of Miklaus. Olga was born to Miklaus and Cecilia Blechova
on 28 December 1921. It appears that Cecilia Blechova
(b. 19 September 1897) died on 26 March 1922, and that
Miklaus then married Cecilia’s sister, Fany Blechova (b.
10 May 1903), on 1 November 1923. Miklaus and Fany
had two daughters, Magdalena, ‘Magda’, born 23 August
1924 and Cecilia, ‘Cilka’, and Fany would have also 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.
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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 daughters’
birth certificates and their school records vary wildly – he
is a salesman, a tradesman, an industria
l 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 them-
selves in an official context as Czechoslovakian, the country was divided in two and Hungary also took control of an
area in the south-east. 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
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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, sepa-
rate (but very similar) languages. Both are West Slavic
languages and are closely related to Polish. When visiting
Cilka’s home town 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 where they were put into
cattle wagons bound for Auschwitz. Miklaus and the three
girls entered Auschwitz on 23 April 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