The Rest Is Memory

The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo in the hands of one of our greatest novelists.

First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a village in southeastern Poland before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. Three months later she is dead.

How did this—the fictionalized account of a real person who was Catholic—happen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa’s story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles, Jewish and Catholic, who perished during the German occupation. Also evoking, among others, the writer Tadeusz Borowski’s ill-fated life and Janusz Korczak’s valorous attempts to save orphaned children, Czeslawa becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.