In 1942 Cilka Klein is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. The Commondant at Birkenau, Schwartzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair, and forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka’s learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival.
After liberation, Cilka’s 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, biput imprisoned once again, Cilka’s faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, each day a battle for survival. Cilka’s befriends a woman doctor, and learns to nurse the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under imaginable conditions. And when she tends to a man called Alexandr, Cilka’s finds that despite everything, there is room in her heart for love.
