Cilka's Journey(99)
I am comforted by the knowledge Cilka spent nearly five decades with the man she loved and, according to her friends and neighbors, 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 toward their husbands.
When writing of the rape, yes, there is no other word for it, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found very little documented in the filmed testimonies. What I did find were papers written more recently when female interviewers 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 are 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 rumored 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 to hear his story firsthand. I did not have this luxury with Cilka. Determined to tell her story, to honor 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. 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 circumstances. 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 meticulous 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 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 honored to bring it to you. She was just a girl, who became a woman, who was the bravest person Lale Sokolov ever met.
Additional Information
Cecilia “Cilka” Klein was born in Sabinov, eastern Slovakia, on March 17, 1926. Her mother was Fany Kleinova, née Blechova, her father, Miklaus Klein (b. January 13, 1895). Cilka was the youngest of three daughters of Miklaus. Olga was born to Miklaus and Cecilia Blechova (b. September 19, 1897) on December 28, 1921. It appears that Cecilia Blechova died on March 26, 1922, and that Miklaus then married Cecilia’s sister, Fany Blechova (b. May 10, 1903), on November 1, 1923. Miklaus and Fany had two daughters, Magdalena, “Magda,” born August 23, 1924, and Cecilia, “Cilka,” and Fany would also have 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.
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 industrial business employee and latterly a driver. It seems that he worked for a Mr. Rozner in Bardejov, possibly as his driver.