Cilka's Journey(98)

“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 gray 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 business 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.”





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, 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 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 Ko?ice. 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 understand 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 Ko?ice, 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 smuggled 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 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 consequences 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 and 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 traveled to Ko?ice, 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 neighbors 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 neighbor 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 significant Jewish days of celebration. They shared a hope that they might one day visit Israel. Neither ever did, he said.

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 traveled to Sabinov, an hour’s drive north of Ko?ice, 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 excellent for behavior and manners. Cilka shone in both mathematics and sports.

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.