Cilka's Journey (ARC)
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the Shoah. We do not know when Miklaus, Fany, Magda
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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 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
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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 24 July 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
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AFTERWORD BY OWEN MATTHEWS
Vorkuta – The White Hell
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 Honour 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
one of scale – Stalin’s Gulag was far larger than anything
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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 labour. But where the Germans used Zyklon-B
poison gas, Stalin preferred to let cold, hunger and over-
work do their lethal work.
Over eighteen 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 aristo-
crats. 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 collabo-
rators 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.
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Alongside the intellectuals and war criminals were 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 chron-
icler, described Stalin’s system of forced labour 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 labourers, and others where impris-
oned 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 colonised by
State prisoners who built dozens of brand-new cities,
roads, railways, dams and factories where there had previ-
ously 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 kilometres
(1,200 miles) north of Moscow and 160 kilometres (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 organising an
exped ition to sink the first mine in the area. In the early
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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 through 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 watch tower, 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 labour
needed to turn this desolate site into a major industrial
centre. By 1938, the new settlement contained 15,000
prisoners and had produced 188,206 tonnes of coal.
Vorkuta had become the headquarters of Vorkutlag, a
sprawling network of 132 separate labour camps that
covered over 90,000 square kilometres – 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 esti-
mated 2 million prisoners passed through Vorkuta’s camps
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between 1931 and 1957 – an estimated 200,000 of them perished from disease, overwork, and malnourishment in
the Arctic conditions.
By the 1940s, Vorkuta had been connected to the rest
of Russia by a prisoner-built railway. There is still no road to Vorkuta, even today. A brand-new city had been built
on the unstable permafrost – the deep-lying soil that never
thaws, even in the height of summer. The city boasted a
geological institute and a university, theatres, puppet thea-
tres, swimming pools and nurseries. The guards and
administrators lived lives of comparative luxury. ‘Life was
better than anywhere else in the Soviet Union,’ remem-
bered Andrei Cheburkin, a foreman in the neighbouring
nickel-mining Gulag of Norilsk. ‘All the bosses had maids,
prisoner maids. Then the food was amazing. There were
all sorts of fish. You could go and catch it in the lakes.
And if in the rest of the Union there were ration cards,
here we lived virtually without cards. Meat. Butter. If you
wanted champagne you had to take a crab as well, there
were so many. Caviar . . . barrels of the stuff lay around.’
For the prisoners, however, the living conditions were
shockingly different. Most lived in flimsy wooden barracks
with unplastered walls, the cracks stopped up with mud.
The inside space was filled with rows of knocked-together
bunk beds, a few crude tables and benches, with a single
sheet-metal stove. One photo of a women’s hut does show
single beds, and embroidery strung around the hut, as in
this narrative. In photographs of Vorkuta taken in the
winter of 1945 the barracks are almost invisible – their
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steeply sloping roofs come almost to the ground so that the snow accumulating around them would insulate them
from the bitter Arctic cold.
Almost all survivors speak of the ‘terrible heavy smell’
that pervaded the barracks. Few Gulags had any kind of
laundry facilities, so filthy and mildewed clothes would lie
drying along the edge of the bunks, the tables, and on
every available surface. At night, prisoners use 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’.
In the centre of most of Vorkutlag’s hundred-plus camps
was a large open parade ground where the prisoners stood
to attention twice a day to be counted. Nearby was a mess
hall, where prisoners were fed a daily soup made of ‘spoiled
cabbage and potatoes, sometimes with pieces of pig fat,
sometimes with herring heads’ or ‘fish or animal lungs and
a few potatoes’. The convicts’ area was usually surrounded
by double rings of barbed wire, patrolled by Alsatian guard
dogs, and surrounded by guard towers. Beyond the wire
were the guards’ barracks and administrators’ houses.
Who were the guardians of this nightmare world?
‘Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own
people?’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked. ‘Does it really
stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.’
Some of the guards in the Gulag were themselves former
prisoners. Many more convicts served as druzhinniki – the 481YY_tx.indd 420
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prisoner trusties who were given extra food for their role in keeping order in the camp and informing on potential
troublemakers.
Most guards, though, were professional secret policemen
who volunteered for the service. The men drawn to serve
in the Soviet secret police, in the famous phrase of its
founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, could be either ‘saints or
scoundrels’. Clearly the service attracted more than its fair share of sadists and psychopaths, as witnessed by the
memoirs of camp guard officer Ivan Chistyakov, who
described ‘the bunch of misfits’ who were his drunken
subordinates. He called the Gulag a ‘madhouse shambles’
and often dreamed of exposing his fellow officers’ ‘illit-
eracy’ and ‘misdeeds’. Perhaps the most chilling
psychological insight offered by Chistyakov’s diary is the
portrait of a humane man conforming to an inhuman
system. ‘I’m beginning to have that mark on my face, the
stamp of stupidity, narrowness, a kind of moronic expres-
sion,’ he wrote. ‘My heart is desolate, it alarms me.’ And
the diary is also a chronicle of the essential selfishness of human suffering: Chistyakov often lamented for himself
but rarely for the inmates, whom he described as lazy and
dishonest. ‘Today . . . I had to imprison one woman, there’s some muddle about an escape, a conflict with a phalanx
leader, a knife fight,’ wrote Chistyakov. ‘To hell with the
lot of them!’ But it is they, not he, who were being starved
and worked to death.
‘To do evil a human being must first of all believe that
what he’s doing is good,’ wrote Solzhenitsyn. ‘Or else that
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it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.’
Chistyakov offered no justification for the slave-labour
system that he was helping to run – only insight into the
banality of evil. He, and hundreds of thousands of other
officers, were only following orders, and the inhuman
system of which he was a part seemed to Chistyakov as
inexorable and invincible as the crushing frosts and the
buzzing summer flies.
In the frozen hell of Vorkuta, male prisoners were
expected to work ten-hour days – redu
ced in March 1944
from twelve hours after too many work accidents began
to impair productivity – down jerry-built and desperately
unsafe coal mines. Records for the year 1945 list 7,124
serious accidents in the Vorkuta coal mines alone.
Inspectors laid the blame on the shortage of miners’ lamps,
on electrical failures, and on the inexperience of workers.
Camp life was no less harsh for the tens of thousands
of women imprisoned in Vorkuta. Though spared the
mines, female prisoners were nonetheless expected to
perform heavy physical labour, hauling coal and water,
digging ditches, working in brickworks, carrying supplies
and building barracks. The women’s quarters were sepa-
rated from the men’s by walls of barbed wire – but
prisoners mixed freely during the day. Many camp guards,
and also the more powerful trusties, kept women prisoners
as servants and mistresses. They were often referred to as
camp ‘husbands’ and ‘wives’. Rape by fellow inmates and
guards was prevalent. A 1955 report noted that ‘ven ereal
disease, abortions and pregnancies were commonplace . . .
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pregnant women were sent to a special camp where work was lighter. A mother was allowed to stay with her child
for two years, after which it was placed in a special nursery and the mother returned to her original camp. She received
photographs and reports of the child’s development and
was occasionally permitted to see it.’ But in practice, not
all were this fortunate. The same report noted that out of
1,000 female inmates at Vorkuta’s Brickworks No 2., 200
were suffering from tuberculosis.
In the harsh conditions of the camps, prisoners formed
tribes in order to survive. Poles, Balts, Ukrainians,
Georgians, Armenians and Chechens all formed their own
national brigades, slept separately in national barracks,
and organised celebrations of national holidays. Adam
Galinski, a Pole who had fought with the anti-Soviet Polish
Home Army, wrote that: ‘We took special care of the youth
. . . and kept up its morale, the highest in the degrading
atmosphere of moral decline that prevailed among the
different national groups imprisoned in Vorkuta.’ Jews,
however, were a special case – they lacked the common
language and common national identity to form a coherent
tribe. Many Jews – such as the influential Yiddish writer