A Holocaust novel zigzags through fact and fiction to memorialize a Polish teenager

A black-and-white photograph of a pretty young girl with a bruised lip, a striped uniform and a numbered tag adorns the cover of Lily Tuck’s short novel “The Rest Is Memory.” An official image made by a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz, it is a rare vestige of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Polish Catholic teenager who lived and died at the most notorious of Nazi concentration camps.

The rest, notwithstanding Tuck’s title (from a Louise Glück poem), is not memory. It is fiction. Tuck weaves her story around the photo, part of a triptych of images of Czeslawa, and anchors it within a carapace of historical fact. Her tale, structured as a series of short takes, is a shimmeringly delicate invention. Cool and spare, the third-person narrative zigzags through time, accumulating authenticity and power. It is hard to stop reading.

Tuck, the biographer of Elsa Morante and winner of the National Book Award for fiction for “The News From Paraguay,” moves easily among genres. “The Rest Is Memory” evokes the work of W.G. Sebald, a German writer who similarly merged fact, fiction and photography in his treatment of Holocaust themes. Tuck’s descriptions of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family share the icy blankness of Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film, “The Zone of Interest,” adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel.

“The Rest Is Memory” isn’t truly a memoir. But its aim, above all, is to memorialize — to restore to life, in effect, one of about 6 million Polish civilians and soldiers — Catholics, Jews and others — killed by the Nazis and their accomplices. The project recalls the biblical injunction quoted in Thomas Keneally’s book “Schindler’s List” and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film adaptation: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

(Liveright)

The 6-million figure, which Tuck cites, is initially confusing, perhaps intentionally so. It also represents the estimated number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, a more familiar statistic. Tuck blurs the boundaries between those two sets of deaths. Associated most closely with the systematic mass murder of European Jews, the Holocaust, for some, also encompasses the deaths of millions of other civilians as a result of Nazi persecution and violence. The term remains contested, and Tuck weighs in on the side of inclusion.

The layering of fact and fiction in “The Rest Is Memory” is cunning. Nazi villains, Polish heroes and concentration camp victims are juxtaposed in snippets of prose, and fictional passages abut related factoids. After Czeslawa laments the absence of her long hair, Tuck explains, “Thread spun from the prisoners’ hair was used to make yarn, felt, and socks for submarine crews and for railroad workers.”

The historical Czeslawa hailed from a rural village in southeast Poland. Tuck imagines her character leading an impoverished existence with her frustrated but stoic mother, Katarzyna, and brutal father, Pawel. The child pursues mundane tasks and modest pleasures: completing farm chores, decorating Easter eggs, riding a motorcycle with a boy she likes, Anton, who is brutish in his own way.

The girl’s fortunes, never particularly bright, crater after the Nazi invasion of Poland. Her father is executed, and she and her mother are deported to Auschwitz. Wilhelm Brasse, an official camp photographer, captures images of the 14-year-old after she has been slugged in the face by a guard. In an author’s note, Tuck says her novel was inspired by a New York Times obituary of Brasse that included the triptych of Czeslawa photos.

Author Lily Tuck

(Julie Thayer)

Other notable Poles also figure in the narrative. Among them is Janusz Korczak, remembered as the Warsaw Ghetto orphanage director who refused to abandon his Jewish charges when they were deported to Treblinka. Tuck imagines that Czeslawa has read his popular 1933 children’s book, “Kaytek the Wizard.” At Auschwitz, she and a girlfriend recite the book’s incantatory passages of magic, hoping for their own lives to be transformed.

Tadeusz Borowski, celebrated for a short-story collection set in Auschwitz, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” turns up too. Tuck’s quotations from his book include a searing description of a mother, greedy for life, running fruitlessly from her own doomed child. Borowski, who was not Jewish, survived Auschwitz and Dachau but committed suicide in Warsaw in 1951, at age 28 (Tuck incorrectly says he was 29).

Czeslawa and her mother aren’t consigned to the gas chambers. Instead, they perform back-breaking labor in the cold, on starvation rations and little sleep. They inhabit a fetid and overcrowded former stable. Death surrounds and menaces them. At one point, they purloin shoes from a corpse. And one dark morning, after being roused for a roll call, they witness the consequences of a failed escape attempt: “A bright light from one of the sentry towers shines on the barbed-wire fence, which is electrified, and on the woman who is hanging from it.”

To counteract such images of horror, Czeslawa calls up snippets of her past, including a chicken she loved and a guard dog she feared. Memories are, sure enough, what is left to her. Meanwhile, her mother, Katarzyna, gradually forgets her unsympathetic husband. Her solace is fantasizing about a handsome pilot she once kissed, about a life she might have lived. “It’s a fairy tale,” she tells Czeslawa. Their own lives, we know, won’t have a fairy-tale ending.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.