I loved this book. I’ve read so many books centered on events on world war 11 but I never realized that some people released from concentration camps were transported to gulag for various offenses, usually born from the need to survive. Cilka’s survival is just short of miraculous and her story, despite her pain, is hopeful and uplifting. She lives through rape and humiliation in Birkenau to face a 15 year term in a Russian gulag for collaborating with the Germans. Yet if she hadn’t done so she would have been killed in some way. And in the gulag, she’s raped and humiliated again. But she finds love and lives to tell her story. It’s incredible to me that so many survivors of the camps were vilified or felt intense guilt at surviving when so many people died. My next read? The Tatooist of Auschwitz