Her beauty saved her life - and condemned her. In 1942 cilka Klein is just sixteen years old when she is taken to auschwitz-birkenau concentration camp. The Commandant at birkenau, schwarzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair, and forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival. After liberation, cilka is charged as a collaborator by the Russians and sent to a desolate, brutal prison camp in Siberia known as vorkuta, inside the Arctic circle. Innocent and imprisoned once again, cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, each day a battle for survival. Cilka befriends a woman doctor, and learns to nurse the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under unimaginable conditions. And when she tends to a man called Alexander, cilka finds that despite everything, there is room in her heart for love. Based on what is known of cilka klein's time in Auschwitz, and on the experience of women in Siberian prison camps, cilka's journey is the breath-taking sequel to the tattooist of Auschwitz. A powerful testament to the triumph of the human will, this novel will make you weep, but it will also leave you astonished and uplifted by one woman's fierce determination to survive, against all odds.

Heather Morris is a native of New Zealand, now resident in Australia. For several years, while working in a large public hospital in Melbourne, she studied and wrote screenplays, one of which was optioned by an Academy Award-winning screenwriter in the US. In 2003, Heather was introduced to an elderly gentleman who ‘might just have a story worth telling’. The day she met Lale Sokolov changed both their lives. Their friendship grew and Lale embarked on a journey of self-scrutiny, entrusting the innermost details of his life during the Holocaust to her. Heather originally wrote Lale’s story as a screenplay – which ranked high in international competitions – before reshaping it into her debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.