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To have lost everything. To have had to endure what she has endured, and be punished for it. Suddenly the needle feels as heavy as a brick. How can she go on? How can she work for a new enemy? Live to see the women around her tire, starve, diminish, die. But she—she will live.
Deeply and instinctively, Cilka still often reaches for prayers. Her religion is tied to her childhood, her family, traditions and comfort. To another time. It is a part of who she is. At the same time, her faith has been challenged. It has been very hard for her to continue believing when it truly does not seem that actions are fairly rewarded or punished, when it seems instead that events are random, and that life is chaotic.
She still doesn’t believe she is free. Maybe the world is just a wider prison, where she has no family and no friends and no home.
Cilka’s last sight of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp would have been of the wrought-iron sign erected over the gates: Arbeit Macht Frei—“Work Brings Freedom.” The first thing she would have seen on her arrival in the Soviet Gulag camp at Vorkuta was another sign: “Work in the USSR is a matter of Honor and Glory.” Another declared that “With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness.” A taste for sadistic irony was just one of the many traits that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR shared.
Both Hitler’s concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag existed for the same purpose—to purge society of its enemies, and to extract as much work from them as possible before they died. The only real differences are ones of scale—Stalin’s Gulag was far larger than anything Hitler ever conceived—and of efficiency. Stalin certainly shared Hitler’s genocidal tendencies, condemning entire ethnic groups, such as the Chechens, Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, to mass deportation, death marches and forced labor. But where the Germans used Zyklon-B poison gas, Stalin preferred to let cold, hunger and
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