Cilka's Journey
Heather Morris returns to the world of The Tattooist of Auschwitz with the story of Cecilia Klein, the young woman Lale Sokolov could only briefly mention as having survived something even worse than the camp itself. Liberated from Auschwitz at sixteen in 1945, Cilka is immediately tried by Soviet authorities for collaboration, sentenced to fifteen years, and shipped to Vorkuta, an Arctic-circle gulag where she is set to work in the prison hospital. There she is taught nursing by a kind doctor, falls cautiously in love with another prisoner, and tries to imagine a life past her own survival. Morris, working from interviews and Soviet camp records, has been clear about how much of Cilka's later life is fictionalized, and the book has drawn critical debate over that line. It nonetheless reads as a powerful, propulsive companion to her debut.
What you might want to know about Cilka's Journey
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
After surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau, sixteen-year-old Cilka Klein is convicted of collaboration by Soviet liberators and sentenced to a Siberian Gulag. The novel follows her years in the Vorkuta camp infirmary.
Cilka's Journey is fictional but based on the real Cecilia Klein, a survivor mentioned in The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Heather Morris drew on documented details of Klein's life and the Soviet labor camps where she was sent after liberation.
Reading The Tattooist of Auschwitz first adds context, since Cilka appears as a character there. Cilka's Journey can stand on its own, however, since it focuses on her postwar imprisonment in Vorkuta.
Cilka's Journey is 384 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Cilka's Journey takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Cilka's Journey is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Cilka's Journey is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
