Page 108 of Cilka's Journey

There are cries and moans all around them.

Hannah takes short, sharp breaths. She reaches out with her non-injured arm and grasps the front of Cilka’s apron.

“Cilka,” Hannah says, her voice choked with blood, “you are strong too.”

Tears well up in Cilka’s eyes. She takes Hannah’s hand from the front of her apron, curls her fingers around it. With her other hand she keeps the pressure on the chest wound. Trying, failing, to stop the bleeding.

Hannah squeezes her hand back.

“Just keep making sure”—Hannah says, gasping for air—“you do not let them break you.” She pushes these last words through her teeth, fiery and tough. “Please…” she says. “Say goodbye to Elena for me.”

“Hannah…” Cilka says, tears rushing now down her cheeks, her lips. “We need you.”

“I’m not afraid,” Hannah says, and closes her eyes.

Cilka sits with Hannah as her breaths come further and further apart, and then not at all. She cries for the loss of a person of such strength and integrity. Hannah may not have liked Cilka, or been able to understand what it had been like in thatother place. But Cilka respected her. Everyone affected by war, captivity, or oppression reacts differently—and away from it, people might try to guess how they would act, or react, in the circumstances. But they do not really know.

Once she has composed herself, and washed the blood from her hands, she picks the list back up and completes her task.

She hands the list of names to Yelena.

“I hope this will do,” she says.

She needs to get back to the hut to break the news.

“Ah, hope, now that’s a word we must use more often here,” Yelena replies. She looks up from the list, at Cilka. She frowns. “Cilka, are you okay?”

Cilka nods. It is too much to explain right now. “I just have to get back to my hut.”

“You may go,” Yelena says.

Life in the camp and in the hospital slowly returns to normal. Despite the white nights, no one risks being outside in the evenings due to the increased guard presence along the perimeter fence, and the sense that the guards are still jittery.

The hut mourns Hannah. Though she was always finding ways to get under her hut-mates’ skin, she was admired, especially now that the women see what she used to do for them all. Elena takes it the hardest, beating herself up for not knowing her plans, for not being by her side.

Cilka learns that the prisoners who survived the uprising face no further punishment. They go back to their huts, to their jobs, their lives returning to normal. Rumors circulate about some prisoners removing the patches identifying them by a number. They are getting away with it, no attempt is being made to force them to sew it back on.

When entering the hospital one day, Cilka is relieved to look across the yard and see the familiar tall, confident figure of Alexandr, closing his eyes and breathing out smoke into the frosty air.

She gets to work, the sight sustaining her for days, like food.

CHAPTER 29

The dark returns.

There’s a blizzard howling outside and only one man braves it to enter Hut 29. Boris. He is distraught. He has learned he is to be released in a few days’ time and is trying to pull strings to have Cilka released too, so they can start a life together.

Cilka says nothing as he regales her with plans of moving back to his home, of his family there and how he will get a job and he can provide for Cilka and the family he wants to have with her. Cilka feels sick. She has to think of something.

She runs her fingers across his scalp as he snuggles into her.

He tells her he loves her.

Cilka is thrown back to another place, another time.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944

“You know I care about you, don’t you?”