Cilka's Journey (ARC)

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Cilka's Journey (ARC) Page 36

by Heather Morris


  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

  Slovakia on 17 March 1926. Her mother was Fany

  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

 

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