Cilka's Journey(100)

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 themselves in an official context as Czechoslovakian, the country was divided in two and Hungary also took control of an area in the southeast. 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 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, separate (but very similar) languages. Both are West Slavic languages and are closely related to Polish. When visiting Cilka’s hometown 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 there they were put into cattle wagons bound for Auschwitz. Miklaus and the three girls entered Auschwitz on April 23, 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 the Shoah. We do not know when Miklaus, Fany, Magda 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 either Ruzyne or 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 the man she met in Vorkuta and subsequently married in order to protect the privacy of his descendants. Cilka and her husband settled in Ko?ice, where Cilka lived until her death on July 24, 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





AFTERWORD


Vorkuta—the White Hell

by Owen Matthews

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 Honor 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 ones of scale—Stalin’s Gulag was far larger than anything 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 labor. But where the Germans used Zyklon-B poison gas, Stalin preferred to let cold, hunger and overexertion do their lethal work.

Over 18 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 aristocrats. 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 collaborators 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. Alongside the intellectuals and war criminals was a large population of murderers, rapists and even convicted cannibals.