First Lines Fridays – 24th April 2020

Hey everyone!
It’s time for this week’s First Lines Fridays post!

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First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

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The first lines of today’s chosen book are:

Cilka stares at the soldier standing in front of her, part of the army that has entered the camp. He is saying something in Russian, then German. The soldier towers over the eighteen-year-old girl. ‘Du bist frei.‘ You are free.

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And the book is…

Cilka’s Journey by Heather Morris

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GoodReads Synopsis:

In this follow-up to The Tattooist of Auschwitz, the author tells the story, based on a true one, of a woman who survives Auschwitz, only to find herself locked away again. 

Cilka Klein is 18 years old when Auschwitz-Birkenau is liberated by Soviet soldiers. But Cilka is one of the many women who is sentenced to a labor camp on charges of having helped the Nazis–with no consideration of the circumstances Cilka and women like her found themselves in as they struggled to survive. Once at the Vorkuta gulag in Sibera, where she is to serve her 15-year sentence, Cilka uses her wits, charm, and beauty to survive.

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I read The Tattooist of Auschwitz back in 2018, and thought it was an amazing read, so of course I wanted to read Cilka’s Journey. I bought a copy as soon as it was released, and it has remained on my shelves ever since. It is on my list to read this year, so once I have got through my back log of books, it will be near the top of the list!

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Have you read this book?
If yes, what did you think of it?

Let me know in the comments!