Cilka's Journey

Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This review refers only to Cilka's Journey. I reviewed Tattooist of Auschwitz separately.
I found 2 aspects of this book.
One, how much fiction it is?
It is known that the Tattooist of Auschwitz raised same issues. Auschwitz Museum commented: "...resulted in creating a distorted version of Auschwitz. This is dangerous and disrespectful to history...". Source: LINK .
It looks, that the case of Cilka's Journey is even more controversial. A stepson of Cilka called the book "lurid and tittillating" LINK.
Reading the Acknowledgments section did not diminish my doubts. Most of thanks is directed to the personnel of the publishing company, few acknowledgments refer to general sources of information about Soviet gulags, even less to survivors or people who met Cilka.
Second aspect: how good is the story?
Initial chapters do not make it clear on what basis Soviet authorities sentenced Cilka to 15 years in gulag. There is a mention, that they screened each Auschwitz survivor ( 6,000 of them?).
In Vorkuta gulag Cilka is being blackmailed to do some favors to her inmates, otherwise some dark facts from her past in Auschwitz will be revealed.
At some stage, the story gets the balance, it turns to relation of numerous cases when Cilka made big sacrifices to help people around her. An obvious conclusion is, that she does it to erase her guilt.
On one hand I was quite touched by this part of the book. On the other, I got a feeling, that the author is just inventing a long sequence of events to demonstrate how noble and honest Cilka was. In my opinion it would have been better if she followed the advice of Cilka's stepson and admitted the the book is 99% fiction.

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