With today's post, this monthly feature enters its second year! While these book reviews haven't generated as much interest as some of my other posts, I know that there are several of you who look forward to them.
This month, I'm featuring two books by the same author, Heather Morris. If you haven't read either of them yet, I would suggest starting with The Tattooist of Auschwitz, but that's not essential. In fact, I read Cilka's Journey first.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
In 2003, Morris, was introduced to Lale Sokolov, an elderly gentleman who "might just have a story worth telling". As their friendship grew, Lale entrusted her with the innermost details of his life during the Holocaust. She originally wrote his story as a screenplay before reshaping it into her debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
In April 1942, Lale, a Slovakian Jew, is one of countless young men who are forcibly stuffed into railroad cars designed to carry livestock and taken to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist) permanently marking his fellow prisoners.
Three months later, as he gently holds the arm of the young girl in front of him and etches a five digit number into her skin, he looks up into her eyes and thus begins a love story that lasts a lifetime. Her name is Gita and meeting her feeds Lale's determination to survive the horrors of the camp. Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, he witnesses horrific atrocities, but also acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his privileged position to exchange money and jewels from murdered Jews for food and medicine to help keep his fellow prisoners alive.
Cilka's Journey
In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, we are introduced to Cilka, a beautiful young prisoner who is forcibly separated from the other women by Johann Schwarzhuber, camp commandant, for his exclusive use. Quickly learning that her survival depends on it, she does what she has to do to stay alive. Although both books are historical novels, Cilka, like Lale, was a real person and at one point, he credits her with saving his life.
Cilka's Journey picks up her story when the war ends and the surviving prisoners are liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Charged as a collaborator for literally sleeping with the enemy, she is sentenced to another fifteen years in a Siberian prison camp. There she faces more challenges, some new and others horribly familiar, including the unwanted attention of the guards. When she meets a kind female doctor, she is taken under her wing and learns to care for the injured and ill in the camp. Working under brutal conditions, she discovers strength she never knew she had and finds that in spite of everything she's been through, she's still capable of falling in love.
While The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey are both vivid and harrowing stories of man's inhumanity to man, they also testify to the resilience of humanity and love under the darkest possible conditions. They aren't easy books to read because of their content, but I found that I couldn't put them down.
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