Published: 4 November 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Cilka’s Journey
By Heather Morris. Echo, 324pp, $32.99
HEATHER MORRIS’S DEBUT NOVEL was a runaway success when it came out in January 2018. The Melbourne-based New Zealand writer wrote The Tattooist of Auschwitz after meeting and befriending the man, Lali Solokov, on whose story the book is based. It’s a love story: Solokov met his wife, Gita Furman, and fell for her, when, as a prisoner-functionary, he tattooed her number on her forearm.
In less than two years, that first book has sold three million copies around the world and the film rights have been bought. It has also been contested, by both Holocaust researchers and the family of the subjects.
The criticisms have been about facts, concepts, moods – all the factors that combine to instil historical understanding in a society – as well as the personal details of the key characters.
Why call Lali “Lale”, Sokolov’s son Gary complained, and why not take the trouble to get the number Furman had tattooed on her arm correct?
Wanda Witek-Malicka of the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre, having studied the novel, said its errors created a “distorted version of Auschwitz” that was “dangerous and disrespectful” to its history.
Morris countered that the book was not “the” story of the Holocaust, but “a” story.
Now a sequel has been published: Cilka’s Journey, which follows the ensuing years of one of the secondary characters in the first book. Witek-Malicka called her story one of the most contentious sequences in The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Scholars have been on alert since the new book was announced.
Cilka is based on a woman called Cecilia Klein. According to the books, she was beautiful, smart and brave and just 16 when she arrived at Auschwitz. She immediately became the sex slave of the commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau, SS-Obersturmführer Johann Schwarzhube, a relationship that lasted two years.
Such things, Holocaust researchers say, simply did not happen between Jewish women and senior members of the SS in the extreme race hatred of the times. The Slovenian writer Peter Juscak, who interviewed Klein, told The Australian that she categorically denied any such sexual relationship.
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Morris has admitted that Cilka’s Journey is not entirely faithful to Klein’s life and that she has padded it out with other information and memoirs of other prisoners.
Again, it’s not “the” story of someone’s life, but “a” story of the life of someone like that. And yet, Morris retains the names – except for the lover and eventual husband, Ivan Kovac, who demanded anonymity and became Aleksandr in Morris’s account. Klein died in 2004.
Cilka’s Journey is the story of Klein’s liberation from Auschwitz by Russian soldiers, who immediately arrested her for sleeping with the enemy. She was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour in the Vortuka gulag in Siberia.
The narrative is heavy on detail: the work, the exhaustion, the illness, the food, the dormitory arrangements, and the nightly visits of the “trusties”, prisoners trusted by the gulag hierarchy, who raped the women constantly and with impunity.
The story set in the gulag is interspersed with contextual flashbacks to Cilka’s time at “the other place”, as she thinks of Auschwitz.
In the gulag, Cilka is again “lucky”. One of the trusties falls for her and, although she doesn’t return his feelings, provides protection from other men. She is too small and weak to be much use for hard labour and suffers from it more than the others, but is noticed by one of the hospital doctors and is trained to be a nurse.
She excels. She is housed in the medical quarters away from the nightly bestiality in the dormitories and gets proper food rations. Eventually, almost at the end of the book, she falls for one of her patients.
This is not fine literature but will move those who know only the bare bones of the history of the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags.
Cilka’s Journey, like its prequel, has a happy-ever-after ending to cap off the nightmare described. Those horrors include all manner of brutality. The physical and psychological sexual exploitation is contrasted with the camaraderie of the women in her Soviet dormitory whom she befriends. Some she is able to help, some are lost to an early death.
Her epiphany comes when an elegant man, a writer and political prisoner she has noticed from time to time around the camp, is beaten up badly and she nurses him back to health. They fall for each other and, inexplicably, both gain an early release.
“It is time to live now, Cilka,” he says, “Without fear, and with the miracle of love.”
Banality and overwrought emotions thread through this book, as they did through The Tattooist. It is not fine literature but will move those who know only the bare bones of the history of the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags. There is no deep moral dimension, except what one can draw from reminders of the reality of those places. Does that matter? Yes, it does. This is not subject matter for light entertainment.
I’m not as rigorous as some about “appropriation”. I believe that appropriation of others’ stories can go some distance towards bridging empathy. David Malouf wrote movingly about indigenous people in Remembering Babylon.
Thomas Keneally wrote a memorable story in Schindler’s List, celebrated as a book and as the film it eventually became. Yannick Haenel’s The Messenger was a brilliant book, though it was belatedly criticised by Claude Lanzmann, auteur of the film Shoah, who figured in it.
Interestingly, the protagonists of all these books were outsiders to the racial horrors they studied: Malouf’s was an English boy (as the author half-was) raised by Aboriginal people; Keneally’s and Haenel’s heroes were gentiles who dedicated their war years to trying to save Jews.
The victims of history were seen through the eyes of outsiders and the authors did not try to imagine themselves into the lives of people whose experiences were unimaginable. Jews have a great literary tradition and it’s wonderful now that First Nations Australians have a snowballing tradition of fine literature from their own perspective. But there remains room for meeting points.
The Yale historian Timothy Snyder, also not Jewish, comes to mind too. He wrote an important and shattering “revisionist” history of the millions who died at the hands of both Nazis and Soviets – mostly Jews, Poles and Ukrainians – in Central and Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945. It was controversial, but mostly lauded for its meticulous research and objectivity.
In the Soviet Union, we have the memoirs and novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the harrowing interviews of Svetlana Alexievich.
Our humanity must insist on two things after the Holocaust. It demands the historical record be kept scrupulously clean and clear. No fuzzying of facts, no blurring of edges, no poetic licence. And when it comes to the emotional landscape, the feelings of people who have been despised, outlawed and the victims of pogroms for centuries, Jews command a unique moral prerogative.
Theodore Adorno has been interpreted as saying there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. And yet, slowly, the memoirs and reflections of Holocaust survivors, brilliant authors such as Primo Levi and Viktor Frankel, appeared, and the poetry to Paul Celan.
Then the second generation, the children of survivors, wrestled with their inherited demons in literature. No one should dare to sensationalise or write schmaltz after them.
Banality blights (Australian)
Photo: Cecilia Klein-Kovac and Ivan Kovac after their release from the gulag in the Soviet Union (circa 1957)
