Cilka's Journey

Cilka’s Journey (2019), written by Heather Morris, is a historical fiction novel that follows the experience of Cilka Klein, beginning with her liberation from Auschwitz and detailing her incarceration in Vorkuta Gulag in Siberia. It is the second book in the Tattooist of Auschwitz series, but instead of being a traditional sequel, Cilka’s Journey follows a new storyline from a character mentioned in the first novel. The connection comes from Lale Sokolov, who was a tattooist in Auschwitz, and whom Cilka knew through a mutual friend named Gita. At one point in the series, Cilka uses her influence with a commandant to transfer Lale to a different block, thus saving his life. Cilka’s Journey begins when the Soviet Army liberates Auschwitz.

Content Warning: This study guide contains depictions of genocide, rape, sexual assault, suicide, and drug addiction. These elements are recurring topics in both this guide and the source text.

Plot Summary

In February 1945, the Soviet Army interrogates Cilka Klein, who has been a prisoner of Auschwitz for the past three years. The Soviets convict her of espionage and sleeping with the Nazis and sentence her to 15 years of hard labor at Vorkuta Gulag in Siberia. On the train to Vorkuta, Cilka befriends Josie Kotecka, a 16-year-old girl, and helps her through the camp intake process to settle into Hut 29.

One night, another prisoner pushes Josie from behind, and when she reaches her hand out to catch herself, she severely burns it on the hut’s stove flue. The next day, the brigadier, Antonina, takes Cilka and Josie to the hospital so that Josie can receive treatment. A doctor named Yelena Georgiyevna notices Cilka’s intelligence and offers her a job at the hospital, and she reluctantly agrees to work there for the next two weeks while Yelena treats Josie. Cilka learns her responsibilities at work quickly and impresses the nurses and doctors, and Yelena eventually offers to train Cilka as a nurse.

One day, the camp commandant’s daughter, Katya, arrives at the hospital with a broken arm. Yelena and Cilka work to calm the girl and her mother, Maria. Maria praises Yelena’s and Cilka’s work to her husband and tells Cilka to let her know if she ever needs anything.

Cilka notices that one of the doctors pays little attention to his patients and provides minimal information in their files. With one particular patient, Cilka works to bring him out of unconsciousness instead of watching for his time of death, despite Yelena’s warning not to interfere. The next day, the doctor fires Cilka, and she returns to the hut and falls asleep, waking with a start when a guard hits her over the head and orders her to throw everyone’s bedding and mattresses into the middle of the floor. The guard sees a patch of Russian writing sewn onto Josie’s sheet, and when Cilka takes responsibility for it, the guard sentences her to solitary confinement.

Yelena gets Cilka a new job in the maternity ward with Petre, a doctor who went to school with Yelena. Cilka immediately helps a woman deliver a baby and learns how to prepare for the next patient. Another day, while walking a new mother to the nursery, she notices that there are only three women to care for 20 babies and toddlers. She also notices that several babies are lethargic and sick. A few weeks later, Petre and Cilka return to the nursery to care for the ill and malnourished babies and find additional women to work in the nursery. During a conversation with Cilka about her work in the maternity ward, Josie admits that she is pregnant. After Josie’s attempted suicide, Cilka takes her to the hospital, and Petre orders Josie to come to the hospital every day for observation until she delivers her baby.

Typhoid fever runs through the camp, and Cilka works in the infectious ward. After several months, the disease dissipates, and Cilka returns to working in the general ward with Yelena. When summer returns, the women of Hut 29 visit Josie and Natia, her baby, several times. Over the winter, Cilka begins working on the ambulance with Kirill and Pavil. Despite her small size, she is brave and capable. During this time, Cilka finally opens up to Yelena and talks about her experience at Auschwitz, something she normally hides out of fear of losing her friends.

Summer arrives, marking Cilka’s fifth year at Vorkuta. One day, Cilka and the ambulance go to the commandant’s house with the ambulance because Katya, the commandant’s daughter, has an inflamed appendix. Cilka works just as well with the little girl this time as when Katya broke her arm, and Maria requests Yelena as her daughter’s doctor. Yelena and Cilka remove Katya’s appendix, and afterward, Maria offers to help Cilka get released from the camp. Cilka asks if Josie can take her place, and Maria agrees. The next day, Josie and Natia leave the camp and take the train to Moscow, where Josie will live with and work for one of Maria’s friends.

During an ambulance call to a mine explosion the following winter, Pavel dies in a tunnel collapse, and Cilka is injured. After Cilka recovers, an officer comes to the hospital to commend Cilka’s bravery and gives her permission to move into the nurses’ quarters. The following summer, Cilka finds she has feelings for a man named Alexandr Petrik and asks Yelena to remove her from ambulance duty because she no longer wants to risk her safety.

On one of her final ambulance calls, she sees Alexandr lying face down in the snow and bleeding profusely; someone beat him up for smuggling information out of the camp. Cilka takes him to the hospital to care for him and nurses him back to health. However, when he is almost fully recovered, two men sneak into the hospital and beat him up again. To protect him, Yelena and Cilka falsify his chart to say that he died, and Cilka nurses him back to health yet again. On Alexandr’s last day in the hospital, Cilka goes to the administration building as commanded. She learns the administrators are releasing her early and that she must leave immediately. Cilka spends the night outside Vorkuta and goes to the train station the next day. As she tries to get on the train, two men push her aside, and she sees a man fall. It is Alexandr. She goes to him, and they board the train to Moscow together.