A Young Life Tragically Lost

Mark Athitakis reviews Lily Tuck’s novel “The Rest Is Memory.”

By Mark AthitakisJanuary 6, 2025

• Fiction

• History

LILY TUCK’S EIGHTH NOVEL, The Rest Is Memory (2024), concerns the life of Czesława Kwoka, a Polish Catholic girl who was killed at Auschwitz on March 12, 1943. The facts of her life beyond that are scant. She was just 14 when she died; her narrative defies the concept of a human arc. Tuck attempts to fill in some gaps but only so many. This slim book is informed by a tragic constriction—every element of Czesława’s life is defined by being unfinished.

Some of our greatest literature about the Holocaust, including Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960) and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947), chronicles the lives of adolescents. For Tuck, the assignment here is, of course, a bit different. She must fill out the life of this young girl on her own. In lieu of details, we have an abundance of numbers. Czesława was prisoner number 26947—one number above her mother. Tuck shares the prisoner numbers of other girls Czesława lived with at Auschwitz, along with their dates of internment and the square footage in kilometers of the province where Czesława grew up. We are also given the dates of birth and death, the number of women who lived in her Auschwitz barrack (400), and the number of people who were transported as well as the number who survived. And on and on.

Tuck’s precision about numbers is one signal that she’s treading carefully here, but not the only one; though scarcely more than 100 pages, the book is more heavily footnoted than most works of nonfiction. The precision also evokes the ruthlessness of Czesława’s environment. Dehumanization—an essential word in this context—doesn’t entirely get at what Tuck is after here. Do we have the language for what it means to do this to a child? How do we talk about the inhumanity of an unfinished story?

In an author’s note, Tuck explains that she was drawn to Czesława because she had come across photos of her in a New York Times obituary of photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who famously photographed his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz. Czesława was just one of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners he photographed, and her images (one of which is used on the cover of the novel) are at once striking and typical. Her striped prison shirt is too big for her; her lip is bloodied. She looks as if she has just been crying or is about to. Her photo conveys profound suffering, but she is also merely one of thousands, millions.

The Rest Is Memory is narrated as a formal composite of fiction and nonfiction. Tuck imagines snippets and fragments from Czesława’s life, and combines them with historical facts. The effect is bluntly descriptive, preferring the Olympian point of view to close third-person perspective. Tuck doesn’t presume to get too far into the girl’s feelings, though she does want to provide her with experiences, however fragmentary. And it’s the cautiously constructed, fragmentary descriptions that give the novel its power. Czesława’s life appears in scraps of memory: a Catholic catechism, her first crush, her experience in the camps. The novel is broken up into very short sections that usually end bluntly and unhappily—the other shoe drops, the hammer falls, death comes. Here’s one in full:

Of all the chickens, Czesława’s favorite is a pretty orange hen she named Kinga. Kinga lays delicate blue eggs that have a dark orange yolk.

A German soldier will wring Kinga’s neck, pluck, cook, and eat her.

Later, Tuck describes with similar bluntness an incident involving the corpse of a woman who was killed trying to escape the camp and left to rot as an example to other prisoners:

[W]alking by the corpse twice a day, Czesława cannot help but look.

Dangling from the rope around her neck, the woman looks like a puppet.

She has lost one of her shoes.

The shoe is lying on the ground and when, on the way back to the barrack, one of the prisoners leans down to pick it up, a guard shoots her.

The brevity of these descriptions, along with their deliberate pacing, makes certain images and observations stand out in stronger relief. In one instance, the narrative makes a sudden turn, for just one sentence, to check in on the boy Czesława has a crush on: “In the lumber camp close to the Arctic Circle, Anton has lost two of his toes to frostbite.” The wife of Hitler’s lawyer appears for a paragraph, calling herself the “queen of Poland.” “She is a despicable human being,” Tuck writes. Despicable is a rare judgmental adjective in this book; its sudden appearance makes it that much more powerful. In such a spare book, that word, presented with the crisp clarity of fact, carries more than its usual weight.

The spareness of the prose and the brutishness of the endings of each section evoke the spareness and brutality of Czesława’s too-short life; the novel, like its central character, is hellishly constrained by the logic of the Holocaust. “Forget your name,” she is advised by one guard. “You are a number now.” She doesn’t dispute it; indeed, it is the moment she “realizes that all she knows may be useless.”

¤

Though Theodor Adorno famously claimed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” the Holocaust has been described in a variety of registers since the end of World War II, from poetic (Czesław Miłosz) to somber (Wiesel) to allegorical (Art Spiegelman) to sardonic (Tadeusz Borowski, whose story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” is a keystone for Tuck) to unfortunately cutesy (John Boyne’s 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas). Tuck, for her part, uses direct sentences to describe the atrocity.

Tuck’s account is thus different from its famous analogue, the diary of Anne Frank, in which another teenage girl meets her demise in the camps. Both Frank and the fictionalized Czesława are primarily concerned about matters of human connection—romantic, social, familiar. But Frank, at least in the space of her diary for the time she had to fill it, explores feelings and desires amid her fears. “Let the end come, however cruel; at least then we’ll know whether we are to be the victors or the vanquished,” she wrote, two months before she was captured with her family. Memory is much more clinical; Tuck scours the text of feelings and desires but preserves the fear.

In her author’s note, Tuck refers to Czesława simply as “a young life tragically lost”; though she describes cutting out a photo of Czesława from Brasse’s Times obituary, she doesn’t explain why, or why she kept it for nearly a decade before pursuing a novel. If it evokes Frank’s story, it is not to summon her tone or spirit but to show the grim, inevitable end for girls like her, to serve as its punctuation mark.

¤

Throughout her career, Lily Tuck has written about women in constrained situations; it’s almost her hallmark. She began her career with a troika of “woman who” novels. In Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991), two women reveal their failed relationships; The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996) concerns a woman’s entanglement with a husband and spiritual guru; and Siam, or The Woman Who Shot a Man (1999) is a fragmentary story about marriage and murder set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Her best-known novel, The News From Paraguay (2004)—a surprise winner of the National Book Award—concerns the fate of Eliza Lynch, a 19th-century Irishwoman, and her marriage to Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López. Paraguay crystallized a theme that Tuck had spent more than a decade developing: a woman’s limited control over her fate due to politics, and often due to men.

Since Paraguay, she has also maintained a focus on imperfect pairings. In Sisters (2017), the fuming narrator obsesses over her ex-husband’s new wife. In the more overtly autobiographical The Double Life of Liliane (2015), another marriage is on the rocks, partly because of what isn’t being shared—for instance, how the narrator’s father, a French Jew, escaped the camps. “While Liliane is growing up, no one mentions Judaism,” Tuck writes. “No one talks about being Jewish.”

In that context, Memory is the apotheosis of Tuck’s decades-long literary mission; it’s a story about agency, and about the urge to find connection even in the most extreme and brutal environment. By the time Czesława is banished to the women’s camp, she has already experienced unimaginable loss. The men have been exterminated—her father and uncle were shot in a forest, along with a group of storks, which, according to Polish folklore, delivered good luck. Czesława has only her mother Krystyna and other Polish girls from the same province. She and Krystyna share the same love for a folk story, Kaytek the Wizard (1933), written by a Polish author, Janusz Korczak, who was also a victim of the camps. Czesława has only the thinnest of emotional and physical room for friendship, but what else can you do when all is thinness? The camp sparks memories for her, which serve as bulwarks against the horrors of the camp, if only in fantasy.

One aspect of this book that differentiates it from Tuck’s other work is the way in which other women contribute to Czesława’s suffering. The Nazi women embrace the erasure and cruelties of the camp: Hedwig, the wife of camp commander Rudolf Höss, sifts through surrendered possessions to find a French leather purse. (“It was barely used,” Höss tells Heinrich Himmler in the novel.) Hedwig admires the garden she keeps there as a “paradise of flowers.” She comforts a distressed visitor with a trip to the garden and an opportunity to do her own sifting.

¤

In a six-page story, “Carl Schurz Park,” included in Tuck’s 2020 collection Heathcliff Redux, denial of the facts is both quotidian and catastrophic. The story concerns a group of white private school students who, one drunken night, assault a young prostitute (“maybe fifteen or sixteen years old”) and throw her in the East River. The boys are never caught or prosecuted. What’s left are two moments of flickering memories. The first involves one of the murderers at dinner years later talking about the park, sparking a slight sting of memory that almost isn’t a memory at all, just “a moment of overpowering discomfort that manifested itself as nausea and a lack of focus that he could neither understand nor place.” Before that, Tuck enters the girl’s mind just before she drowns: “Would anyone miss her? she wondered, but she did not want to think about that. She wanted to think about drinking a Coke and about how good it would taste. She opened her mouth a little and let the river water in.” Neither is directly facing what has happened, but only one gets the option of surviving this self-denial.

In that light, Memory isn’t so much a short novel about the Holocaust as it is an expansion of the sensibility of “Carl Schurz Park”—an exploration of the oppressor’s toxic self-denial and the victim’s constricted memory and eventual death. The novel is deceptively smooth, built on a simple frame of Czesława’s brief, unhappy life, girded by the unpleasant but reassuring structure of facts and footnotes. The spikiness of each section, as well as each sentence, emerges fully, cycling from one cutoff story to another. This has been a common strategy in literary fiction, designed to capture a sense of precariousness and disassociation. The distinction here is that the pressure that creates the fragments comes from the pressures of historical cruelty; the disassociation comes from the camps shattering every story.

For the girls in the camps, every joy is short-lived, subject to punishment. At one point, Czesława opens her mouth to drink in snowflakes, and a soldier knocks her down. This happens again at the end of the novel: Czesława opens her mouth to the snow one more time, defiant. This will have to qualify as some kind of redemption, some kind of arc.

¤

Featured image: Photo of Czesława Kwoka by Wilhelm Brasse is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.