Cilka Character Analysis

Cilka is an extraordinarily beautiful young woman who works with Gita in the Birkenau administration building. Unlike the other prisoners, Cilka has for some reason been allowed to avoid having her head shaved. Unfortunately, though, it is perhaps because she stands out as one of the only prisoners with long hair that the top commandant at Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, takes notice of her and forces her to become an unwilling mistress, raping her on a regular basis. When Lale manages to survive being tortured in Block 11 and is moved to Block 31 (where prisoners are sent to labor until they die), he asks Baretski to relay a message to Gita, instructing him to make sure that Gita tells Cilka about where he is. At first, Cilka doesn’t understand why Lale would go out of his way to communicate this information to her, but she soon realizes that she can help him by asking for a favor from Schwarzhuber. Lying in bed one night, she points out that she has never asked for anything from the commandant, and when he agrees that this is true, she asks him to have Lale transferred out of Block 31. In the end, then, Cilka is the reason Lale is able to avoid death in Block 31 and return to his position as the tattooist.