Debbie's Reviews > Cilka's Journey

5 gold stars for an extra-strong woman, and 5 sure stars for this extra-strong book!

Wow, this is some powerful historical fiction! It’s based on the real life of an unsung hero, Cilka, who went through the Holocaust and ended up in a Siberian labor camp. The book started out way too depressing—every single sentence was doom and gloom to the nth degree. The language seemed sort of dead and monotonous, and as the sentences and dread piled up, I could barely stand it. I thought, “Why am I reading this? This makes me feel awful! It’s too much!” I understand that the author wants to educate us about the gruesomeness of the times, but there’s a limit to what I can take. It’s a given that I can’t truly know how it felt to be Jewish in Europe during the Holocaust, but my overactive empathy gene makes me try to picture the horror, and it haunts me if I dwell on it.

I considered ditching the book. It’s not that I wanted lightweight; I just wanted it to let up a bit. But then I got totally absorbed in Cilka’s life, and I fell in love with her. Suddenly I couldn’t put the book down. In fact, it almost made me grab my pogo stick. I love it when I go from almost abandoning a book to giving it 5 stars!

This is a story about survival and camaraderie that happened under incredibly harsh conditions. Women in the labor camp had it way worse than the men, and god help them if they got pregnant. The sexual abuse alone was horrific. There were people I vehemently hated and people I completely loved. There are flashbacks to Cilka’s time at Auschwitz, and they are powerful, too.

This isn’t a book where I zealously highlighted sentences. Few words of wisdom, just a closeup look at an amazing person who endured unimaginable suffering. I only underlined sentences that I thought were eloquent, and there weren’t a lot. If I dole out 5 stars, it usually means I highlighted like crazy. Here, I gave the book 5 stars because Morris is such a good storyteller: The plot is well paced and almost flawless, and Cilka is well drawn. Morris taught me things about Siberian labor camps, mostly about the dynamics of prisoners and what they were forced to endure. Most important, Morris made me feel something for Cilka and her fellow sufferees. Highlights not required.

Cilka is full of positive adjectives: she’s smart, resourceful, kind, strong, resilient, and selfless—a version of Mother Theresa or Florence Nightingale. I found it impossible not to admire Cilka and to feel her pain. Of course, as in a lot of fiction, she has a secret, which always ups the anguish and the drama.

Two small nits. “Fuck” is used occasionally (as a noun), by men wanting to have sex, and I bought that. However, there are numerous times when “fuck” is used as an adjective or is otherwise colloquial, and the sentences seemed all wrong. The usage is way too modern. This one, spoken by a female inmate, especially bugged me: “I want you to go fuck yourself.” Each time I ran across a phrase like that, I was startled, because it didn’t fit the tone and style of the book. And each time, I was pulled out of the scene and the time period, which pretty much wrecked it for me for a short while. (Meanwhile, I can’t believe I’ve devoted a whole paragraph to the word “fuck”!)

The other nit: I don’t think Morris made the camp cold enough. She didn’t talk about the temperature much, and there were few scenes where we see people enduring frigid conditions. Most of us think of Siberia as being unbearably cold. Yet here I often forgot about the climate. I thought the harsh weather should have been ever-present.

The book will stay with me a long time; it’s storytelling at its best. If you love historical fiction, you’ll love this. I’m for sure going to check out Morris’s earlier book, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, where Cilka is introduced.

I would be so happy to see a movie based on this book. Still trying to pick the actress for the role, in case the producer calls me, lol.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.