ARC Review | Cilka’s Journey

My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Title: Cilka’s Journey

Author: Heather Morris

Format: Paperback

Pages: 352

Publication Date: October 1, 2019

Categories: Historical Fiction, Holocaust, Gulag, Rape, Survival Story

Disclaimer: I won a copy of this ARC from Bookishfirst for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, in 1942. The Commandant at Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair, and forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival.

After liberation, Cilka is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to Siberia. But what choice did she have? And where did the lines of morality lie for Cilka, who was sent to Auschwitz when still a child? 

In a Siberian prison camp, Cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, including the unwanted attention of the guards. But when she makes an impression on a woman doctor, Cilka is taken under her wing. Cilka begins to tend to the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under brutal conditions.

Cilka finds endless resources within herself as she daily confronts death and faces terror. And when she nurses a man called Ivan, Cilka finds that despite everything that has happened to her, there is room in her heart for love.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and Bookishfirst for giving me a chance to win an arc of this book, Cilka’s Journey.

I did not read The Tattooist of Auschwitz but it is on my TBR list. I had a chance to win an arc of Cilka’s Journey and was pleasantly surprise to see I did win a copy. I knew right away this would be a difficult read. My husband is Jewish through his father’s side, and from what I’ve learned, his ancestors from that side of his family came from Russia. So this is a part of my kids history now…but anyway…I knew this would be a hard subject to read.

We follow Cilka out of Auschwitz, and being someone who didn’t read the first book, I believe I followed pretty well because this book has flashbacks of Cilka’s time in the concentration camp. All of it is horrible. Everything she went through, what she had to do to survive, what it does to her psyche, and how she stays strong to keep on living. But she leaves Auschwitz and ends up a prisoner (accused of sleeping with the enemy-Nazis) and ends up going to the Gulag in Siberia. Like how much worse can things get for Cilka?! I wanted to scream at the heavens for this woman.

She’s not at a concentration camp but she is at a prison labor camp, where she is still raped by strange men, still fighting for survival in the hierarchies that are formed within the places she tries to survive, whether it’s in the hut she’s condemned to live it, or the place she’s sent to work at. This is not an easy journey for Cilka. And I kept wondering as I read, will it get better?

This book is an engrossing and quick read but I read it in three days because I needed a break from the horror. I would stare at my kids while they slept, wondering what part of them someone could hate…😢💔. There were many moments my heart hurt so bad reading this book.

What makes this story incredible is how she survives, because I don’t think I could have. Her will to survive and search for hope is beyond admirable. And though she questions herself quite often, she finds a way to keep going. Did her looks save her? Her curse and her luck was her beauty. But I love how smart she is, she is a survivor, works hard, cares for others even when most people would have given up or been past caring.

She survived Auschwitz. And the Soviet Gulag in Siberia. After the story there are also notes in the back of the book that I continued reading. There is more information about the Gulag which I was interested in reading because it’s a part of history we don’t hear a lot about.

Stories like Cilka’s Journey are vital. It reminds us of a horrible time in history, reminds us so we hopefully never end up there again. Now I have to read The Tattooist of Auschwitz because Cilka’s life starts there but I really felt like Cilka’s Journey is pretty complete as a standalone.

This a story of hope and the human spirit’s will to survive the very darkest of times.