Delighted to include this title in the December edition of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national lifestyle and culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

A Catholic girl in Auschwitz. Lily Tuck has done deep research to bring this young girl’s life back for us to learn from. Very touching story.

What a gut wrenching story to read. While a lot of Czeslawa’s story may be imagined so many of parts of this book are based on true events. Tuck’s disjointed writing style may not be everyone’s cup of tea but it worked really well for this story. She was able to include some very deplorable and heartbreaking facts about the way in which Auschwitz prisoners were treated that wouldn’t have worked otherwise. The writing is straightforward and it your face. It forces you to face it and digest it. The inhumanity of those in charge is front and center and it is painful. There were many time I had to put the book down.

As for Czeslawa’s story - she comes alive in a way that allows the reader to love her. She is a teenager whose life gets interrupted and cut short by Nazis. Though imagined this could’ve been the life and story of any of those girls and I’d like to think we read someone’s story here.

Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company & NetGalley for this ARC

Thank you Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book. These opinions are completely my own.

Wow. Just wow. Although partly fictional, this book will likely get to the reader emotionally as much or more then non fiction novels.

Although it does read like a bizarre telegram, it makes the facts about WW2 pack more of a punch I think. It is almost haunting in a weird dark poetic way. Much like Poland during WW2.

Very dark, very real novel.

In an author’s note at the end of this haunting novella, Lily Tuck explains that she had read an obituary in the "New York Times" of the Polish photographer Wilhelm Brasse who had taken over 40,000 pictures of the prisoners at Auschwitz while he was imprisoned at the camp. Several of Brasse's photographs were of Czeslawa Kwoka, a fourteen-year-old Polish Catholic girl. Tuck imagines that Czeslawa, who was raised in a small village in southeast Poland, had dreams of attending university, but was resigned to helping her abusive father, Pawel, work fields that did not belong to him.

Tuck explains how, in 1941, Hitler planned to expel the Poles from their land and colonize it with German settlers. The first district selected was the Zamosc region, the area where Czeslawa and her family lived. The 110,000 residents were divided into 4 groups: “the first two groups are to be examined to determine whether they are suitable for germanization; the third group is to be sent to the Reich as slave labor; the fourth group is sent to Auschwitz."

In the summer of 1942, Pawel and other farmers in the Zamosc area were rounded up, taken to the Roztocze Forest and shot and buried in a shallow mass grave. Czeslawa and her mother, Kataryzna, arrived in Auschwitz on December 13, 1942. At Auschwitz, Czeslawa and her mother were housed in a barrack that was previously a stable for 52 horses but, in 1942, housed 400 women. The women held in these squalid conditions suffered from severe malnutrition, frostbite, pneumonia, pleurisy, ulcers, abscesses, lice, dysentery and typhus. At the camp, until her health failed, Czeslawa distracted herself by playing jacks with another young prisoner, Krystina Trzesniewska, while Katarzyna survived by dreaming of the handsome pilot with whom she fell in love with when she was thirteen (“a man who fell from the sky”).

Katarzyna died at Auschwitz on February 18, 1943, at age 47. Czeslawa was put to death on March 12, 1943, at age 14, and her friend, Krystina Trzesniewska, died on May 18, 1943, also at age 14. Of the 1057 Polish prisoners sent to Auschwitz from the Zamosc region, 827 died, most within the first months of their arrival at the camp.

Tuck has crafted a unique perspective on a war whose depictions of occupied Poland so often traffic in the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. By twining the heavily-footnoted facts with her fictional imaginings of Czeslawa’s brief stint in Auschwitz, Tuck gives definition to the horrors that often turn abstract in the imagination.

How do you tell the story of an unfinished life?

<I>The Rest is Memory</I> by Lily Tuck is inspired, and I say this tentatively, by the short life of Czeslawa Kwoka. If you don’t know her name, then you likely know her face from a series of photographs taken by Wilhelm Brasse, a photographer imprisoned at Auschwitz who found himself taking photograph after photograph of the men, women and children registered at the camp.

In them, Czeslawa can be seen with glassy eyes--tears, according to the photographer, as she had been struck by a guard prior to being photographed. Blood is visible on her mouth, which appears swollen. These photographs are the only known images we have of Czeslawa, who died less than 4 months after arriving at Auschwitz.

I say that Tuck’s novel is “tentatively” inspired because most of the novel is presumably invented, given how little information there is out there about the real Czeslawa. We know her name; we know where she lived; we know her mother’s name, and that she and her mother were deported first to a transit camp before being sent to Auschwitz. We know what numbers the Nazis assigned to them. We know when they died, though we don’t know exactly how.

<I>The Rest is Memory</I> is not an attempt to recreate Czeslawa’s life from the ground up. Nor is it an attempt to place Czeslawa in a standard historical fiction narrative ,where we might find ourselves following a traditional story arc with fleshed out characters.

Instead, the novel is fractured--offering distant views of Czeslawa and those around her. We are told Czeslawa rides a motorbike with a young man named Anton, who buys her a treat, makes a move, then leaves her on the side of the road when she refuses. We are told about Czeslawa’s home life in one breath, then about her father and uncle’s shooting in the next.

But even here, the novel is not a straightforward telling of Czeslawa’s story--or at least, an imagined version of her story. The novel frequently jumps ack and forth in time, with interruptions of the fictional and non-fictional variety. We are told facts related to the fates of various figures within (and out) of the story, such as who lives or dies and when or how. There are lists of victims from particular regions, quotes from fiction and non-fiction Holocaust narratives, and other tidbits that are written around this fictional version of Czeslawa.

While this may not be a traditional historical fiction, there is something fittingly and emotionally moving about the stark, almost brutal tone of Tuck’s writing style. I couldn’t help but compare it to another recent historical fiction based on another victim of the Nazis--<I>When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank</I>--which is almost on the complete opposite spectrum of storytelling.

Whereas <I>When We Flew Away</I> coats everything in a stuffy lyrical gloss and creates metaphorical beings out of the real life figures depicted in its pages, <I>The Rest is Memory</I> presents things more bluntly.

Even when the story delves into Czeslawa desperately clinging to memories of childhood tales, even when her memories themselves become blurred with dreams and her present awful reality, there is nothing overtly fantastical about it. They are the thoughts of a starving, dying, ill girl who we know does not make it out alive.

And that, I think, is only fitting and appropriate when it comes to depicting an imagined life and death for a young girl.

With that said, there is one significant flaw in this book which must be discussed.

We know very little about the people depicted in this book. We do not how the real Czeslawa was murdered. We do not know her hopes or dreams. We do not know if she ever had a boyfriend, what foods she liked to eat, or even the exact events that led to that memorable, heartbreaking photo of her sitting, head shaven, lip bleeding, in front of a photographer at a concentration camp.
And therein lies a significant issue with the book: it is sorely lacking a more detailed afterword with information about what, exactly, was invented for the story and why the author chose the inventions she did.

The author does include this line in their afterword: "This is a work of fiction based on fact, and in an attempt to bring to life a young life tragically lost ... I imagined a pretty orange hen named Kinga, a creamy karpatka, a Bible with a white leather cover and a game of jacks, Anton with the nice laugh, and the snow."

But there are many other personal details in this book not mentioned above. Were they invented out of whole cloth? Is there any truth to them? I think it does readers a disservice to not go into more detail about what is fictional in this book, particularly as it is the first book (novel or otherwise) to focus on Czeslawa.

It is absolutely necessary to fictionalize things in this type of work. There would be nothing to write about, if Tuck did not make things up. However, as more authors begin to draw on the stories of real victims of Nazism for novels, it begs the question: where do we draw a line, when it comes to fictionalization?

For instance: If we believe the sources on her Wikipedia page, then Czeslawa’s father Pawel likely died when she was young. This would make the novel's version of events--wherein he is shot by Nazis shortly before a teenage Czeslawa and her mother are deported to Auschwitz--entirely imagined.

Moreover, and more importantly, Tuck decided to depict Czeslawa’s father Pawel as physically abusive and unloving to both Czeslawa and her mother.

Was this a complete invention? Is it based on some kernel, however small, of truth? I don't know, because the author does not tell us. And if this was entirely invented, I think it is rather horrifying to assign the traits of "child and spousal abuser" to a real man who was perhaps not even alive when the novel's primary events take place.

Thankfully, this is the only instance in the book where the inventions feel genuinely inappropriate.

I’ve had a difficult time deciding on how I feel about this book. I strongly dislike the decision to invent fictional abuse and assign it to a real person. There are ways to approach sparse historical figures and events without resorting to this type of negative fictionalization.

Yet I do greatly appreciate Tuck’s writing style, and I think it strikes a stronger chord to depict the events simply and brutally versus trussing everything up in flowery language.

In the end, I don’t know where <I>The Rest is Memory</I> will be placed in the years to come, as WW2 breaks away from its last threads of living memory. I can say I would recommend it if you are interested in WW2 historical fiction and are looking for something that isn’t overly flowery or saccharine.

A spare haunting novella about Czeslawa who was 14 when she was sent to Auschwitz. We're all unfortunately familiar with the horrors of Nazi Germany but this is a cautionary tale lest we forget. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. Not an easy read by any means but an important one.

I read "The Rest is Memory" on my iPad, and I am not sure if the footnotes would be formatted in the same way in print, but the footnotes were many, perhaps more words in the footnotes than in the prose, which made it somewhat distracting for me. This novel is labeled as historical fiction, but we know how much truth there is in this depressing holocaust story, and our 14 year old main character certainly doesn't fare well in this horrific novel. I could see YA readers benefiting from this novel when they learn about the concentration camps and the horrific things Hitler demanded from his followers. Perhaps I read this to close to Election Day to be able to handle more bad news, so I may not be the best judge of this novel.

I was not sure I would enjoy reading this book when I saw where it is set, as it is rather unlikely for any book set in Auschwitz to be anything but gruesome and/or depressing. There is certainly enough of this sort of tale in this novel to ring true, but somehow this book is not hard to read, and manages to be lovely and contemplative, enough to balance all the ugliness of seeing the Holocaust up close. This story highlights the very human story of two of the real victims who were sent to Auschwitz, and allows us to imagine all the other stories behind the statistics and shreds of records we have available about the millions of Holocaust victims. This is a surprisingly timely book, and I found myself reflecting on the current seeming-genocide being perpetrated in Gaza, and all the personal stories there that will similarly be lost except for the statistics and shreds of records and ephemera left behind when it is all over. This was an emotionally evocative read, but one well worth experiencing.

Having lost many family memories in the Holocaust, I've read a lot of memoirs, historical accounts, and historical fiction about individuals, groups, and people who suffered and died during this shameful period of history. Lily Tuck's slim volume, The Rest is Memory, tanks among the best and will linger in my memory for a long time. Based on photos taken by a fellow prisoner and published in the NY Times in his obituary, as well as on historical facts, Tuck resurrects the 14-year-old Catholic Pole Czeslawa's experience in Auschwitz, along with her mother a another 14-year-old girl in language characteristic of her body of work. It is a stunning portrait of a girl and of more than six million people, whom we should hold in our collective memories.

Lily Tuck's THE REST IS MEMORY is a haunting and profound work. With its footnotes at the bottom of the page, rather than collected at the end of the book or chapter, it is difficult to read as an ebook. But that placement emphasizes how interwoven, like the lace the young girl's grandmother embroidered on her Communion dress, fact is with fiction. The book arose from a series of photographs that Tuck saw in Wilhelm Brasse's 2012 obituary; as camp photographer, he had photographed thousands of his fellow prisoners. Tuck interweaves the available historical facts with imaginative leaps to tell the story of fourteen year old Czeslaw Kwoka's final three months at Auschwitz. Her crime: she is Polish in a geographical area which has been claimed for German resettlement. With many facts from the time and some delicate extrapolations, Tuck makes this young girl come alive, even as we know she is hurtling toward her death.

With thanks to NetGalley and WW Norton, Publishers for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Rest is Memory by Lily Tuck is about a real-life fourteen-year-old Catholic girl who lived in Poland before being forced to Auschwitz in 1942. Czeslawa Kwoka became number 26947 in the killing camp where the innocent's only "crime" was being racially impure in the minds of many Nazis. Before she was murdered on March 12, 1943, she was photographed by fellow prisoner Wilhelm Brasse who couldn't forget the brutality he had witnessed day in, day out. Lily had been beaten, roughly shaven, dehumanized, forced to silently stand outside for hours, and starved. She existed, not knowing with certainly what happened to most of her family. Surviving under those conditions even for one hour is incomprehensible. She was a child.

Seeing Czeslawa's haunting dentification photographs for the first time tore my heart and when I saw her again on the cover of this book, I got goosebumps Her face etched in untold pain is unforgettable. I had read about the kindnesses and cleverness of Brasse so reading this book was a must for me. The Erkennungdienst descriptions gave me shivers. Though much of Czeslawa's story is re-imagined, there are many truths and facts at the heart of it. We do not know how she was murdered but she was. The horrors of the Holocaust are very real. Heroic children's author and pediatrician Janusz Korczak is mentioned here, too. .

Lily Tuck's starkly simple and raw writing reached my heart. What particularly stood out are the times the author said that Czeslawa would never experience (blank) again. The fact that so many killers were never held accountable is egregious. But this book is about her. Not them.

My sincere thank you to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for providing me with an early digital copy of this heart crushing and powerful book.

I liked this book for the content it had, but I wasn't entirely pulled in due to the way the stories were told. It was broken up, making it challenging to relate all of the people together the way I would have liked. Heartbreaking, emotional, stirring.

Lily Tuck is a fine writer. The Rest is Memory is a novella that is the imagined biography of a real 14-year-old girl who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. The book is vivd and very painful and I had to push myself to finish it. I'm unfortunately familiar with many of the stories Tuck writes of life and death at Auschwitz but the senseless cruelty and brutality as well as the blind eye turned by those who knew about it continue to horrify and sicken me.

The story begin with life soon before the German invasion of Poland. Czeslawa Kwoka lives on a farm and has an ordinary life of schools and crushes and playing her favorite game of jacks. The horror begins with the invasion. Czeslawa is rounded up with her mother. Her father is taken elsewhere. We watch as she is destroyed through starvation and brutality--as well as witnessing the beatings, random often random and casual murder of others of the women and girls she is imprisoned with. We see her develop a friendship with a girl she knew slightly from her village. The two girls try to comfort each other and hold on to some sense of normalcy in the midst of the horror they are living in.

Tuck uses eyewitness testimony along with quotes from some of the Nazi leaders (such as Rudolf Höss who was commandant of Auschwitz) to depict the endless horrors of that camp and that time.

Hard to read, the story is brilliantly told and worth remembering.

This is a really haunting book to read, it is so hard to believe that such depravity went on in this world for so long, this book brings to life the story of one young girl and her experience after being sent to Auschwitz. Fourteen year old Catholic Czeslawa lives in a small village in Poland with her Mother and Father, she is a typical young girl who is interested in a young boy who picks her up on his motorcycle for rides. Her life turns upside down when the Nazi's invade Poland and transports thousands and thousands of people to various places depending on how useful they may be to the German regime. Czeslawa and her family are sent to Auschwitz, her father is separated from them, her mom and her survive the initial selection process, are stripped of all their belongings, tattooed, have their hair shorn and photographed by another prisoner. It's this photo, that's on the book cover, that inspired the author to find out what happened to this young girl. Life in Auschwitz is hell, fed small portions of rotten food, worked for long hours, made to stand for hours on end, disease is rampant and guards are more likely to kill you for sport rather than help you. The author includes footnotes where she got her information, if you have read any books that have touched on the Holocaust then you are probably familiar with many of the acts the Nazis carried out against the people of Poland, some of them are mentioned. A very slim novel but I feel a very important one in the literature around WW2 and the Holocaust. I would highly recommend especially if you have an interest in that time period. Thanks to #Netgalley and #Liveright for the ARC.

Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have seen more movies about the holocaust than I can count yet this short book managed to haunt me with new information. And I do mean haunt. Lily Tuck’s writing is simple and straightforward yet powerful, not an easy task. I am usually not a fan of non-fiction, but I absolutely LOVED the choice to include footnotes. I often stopped reading to write down the name of the non-fiction book in the footnote so I could look it up. I do wish there was a list at the end of all of the non-fiction books she used in her research. Anyone who loves history should read this!

The Rest Is Memory is a brief but haunting piece of historical fiction that depicts a 14 year old girl's story as she is sent to Auschwitz. Tuck's prose pulls no punches and is often brutally straightforward, as a piece of historical work should be. Having a major interest in Polish history, I enjoyed the way this book read similar to a piece of nonfiction and found the insertion of footnotes very helpful. This likely would have been a 4.5 - 5 star read for me had the structure have been a bit different. At times, the story felt very fractured and disjointed, which ultimately I believe was the Tuck's intention. I'm just not sure it entirely worked for me. I would have been more than eager to have read another couple of hundred pages of this story had it been a full length novel. Despite that being my own personal preference, I would still highly recommend The Rest Is Memory to anyone who has an interest in historical fiction.

Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for honest review.

The Rest Is Memory will be published on December 10th, 2024.

I’ve read from Lily Tuck before and really gravitate to her spare, minimal writing style. That style is extremely effecting in this novel, which takes a fourteen year old Polish girl, Czeslawa, who died in Auschwitz, and imagines her life story. Tuck is pulling from an extremely limited knowledge base and she still manages to create a realistic portrait of a devastatingly short life. I feel like the spareness of the prose magnifies the subject and the writing. Every sentence has a meaning and a purpose. It feels wrong to say I loved a book about a subject as calamitous as the holocaust, but I will be thinking about this one for a long time.