What do you think?
Rate this book
The Rest Is Memory
"The Rest Is Memory is a literary resurrection, as shattering as it is astonishing. Lily Tuck has done the impossible; from darkness and hideous cruelty, she has woven an unforgettable paean to hope, to life, to justice." —Junot Diaz
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 small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.
How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? 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 who perished during the German occupation. A decade prior to writing The Rest Is Memory, Tuck read an obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took more than 40,000 pictures of the Auschwitz prisoners. Included were three of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic girl from rural southeastern Poland. Tuck cut out the photos and kept them, determined to learn more about Czeslawa, but she was only able to glean the barest facts: the village she came from, the transport she was on, that she was accompanied by her mother and her neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death. From this scant evidence, Tuck’s novel becomes a remarkable kaleidoscopic feat of imagination, something only our greatest novelists can do.
“Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror” (Susanna Moore), Tuck’s language swirls about, yet not a word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble out at us, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawa’s tragic stay in Auschwitz, the lives of real people such as the barbaric Commandant Rudolf Höss; his unconscionable wife, Hedwig; the psychiatrist and child rescuer Janusz Korczak; and the mordant Polish short story writer Tadeusz Borowski. Although we are certain of Czeslawa’s fate, we have no choice but to keep turning the pages, thoroughly mesmerized by Tuck’s near otherworldly prose.
In Lily Tuck’s hands, The Rest Is Memory becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.
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 small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.
How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? 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 who perished during the German occupation. A decade prior to writing The Rest Is Memory, Tuck read an obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took more than 40,000 pictures of the Auschwitz prisoners. Included were three of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic girl from rural southeastern Poland. Tuck cut out the photos and kept them, determined to learn more about Czeslawa, but she was only able to glean the barest facts: the village she came from, the transport she was on, that she was accompanied by her mother and her neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death. From this scant evidence, Tuck’s novel becomes a remarkable kaleidoscopic feat of imagination, something only our greatest novelists can do.
“Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror” (Susanna Moore), Tuck’s language swirls about, yet not a word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble out at us, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawa’s tragic stay in Auschwitz, the lives of real people such as the barbaric Commandant Rudolf Höss; his unconscionable wife, Hedwig; the psychiatrist and child rescuer Janusz Korczak; and the mordant Polish short story writer Tadeusz Borowski. Although we are certain of Czeslawa’s fate, we have no choice but to keep turning the pages, thoroughly mesmerized by Tuck’s near otherworldly prose.
In Lily Tuck’s hands, The Rest Is Memory becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published December 10, 2024
159 people are currently reading
5284 people want to read
About the author
Lily Tuck
25 books138 followersLily Tuck is an American novelist and short story writer whose novel The News from Paraguay won the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction. Her novel Siam was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has published four other novels, a collection of short stories, and a biography of Italian novelist Elsa Morante (see "Works" below).
An American citizen born in Paris, Tuck now divides her time between New York City and Maine; she has also lived in Thailand and (during her childhood) Uruguay and Peru. Tuck has stated that "living in other countries has given me a different perspective as a writer. It has heightened my sense of dislocation and rootlessness. ... I think this feeling is reflected in my characters, most of them women whose lives are changed by either a physical displacement or a loss of some kind".
An American citizen born in Paris, Tuck now divides her time between New York City and Maine; she has also lived in Thailand and (during her childhood) Uruguay and Peru. Tuck has stated that "living in other countries has given me a different perspective as a writer. It has heightened my sense of dislocation and rootlessness. ... I think this feeling is reflected in my characters, most of them women whose lives are changed by either a physical displacement or a loss of some kind".
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 268 reviews
December 8, 2024
I'm afraid I'd never heard of Lily Tuck before I read this short novel. I'm still trying to work out why since the writing is just exquisite.
I listened to the audio version, which was beautifully read by Elisabeth Rodgers who, I imagine must have had to put any feelings to one side just to get through the text.
The story of Czeslawa is fictional in that the only thing known about her are the basic facts of her very short life. The rest of the story of her life has been imagined by Lily Tuck. The rest of the book are facts about the invasion of Poland, what happened to its people and the facts about those who ran the camps where so many Polish people lost their lives.
I couldn't stop listening to this book even though it was incredibly hard to hear. I think what made it so horrifying was the juxtaposition of Czeslawa having petty quarrels with other children, worrying about her dog, wondering what happened to other inhabitants of her home town as opposed to the stark facts of how Höss and his men ran the camp, their utter indifference to the things that were done to other human beings and the end that the Poles and their tormentors came to.
This is an extraordinary piece of work. I was moved beyond anything else I've ever read about the Holocaust. This is such a powerful novel that should be on everyone's reading list.
Very highly recommended. It is a difficult book to stomach but all the more important for that reason.
Thankyou so very much to Netgalley and RB Media for the audio advance review copy. It felt like a privilege to read this.
I listened to the audio version, which was beautifully read by Elisabeth Rodgers who, I imagine must have had to put any feelings to one side just to get through the text.
The story of Czeslawa is fictional in that the only thing known about her are the basic facts of her very short life. The rest of the story of her life has been imagined by Lily Tuck. The rest of the book are facts about the invasion of Poland, what happened to its people and the facts about those who ran the camps where so many Polish people lost their lives.
I couldn't stop listening to this book even though it was incredibly hard to hear. I think what made it so horrifying was the juxtaposition of Czeslawa having petty quarrels with other children, worrying about her dog, wondering what happened to other inhabitants of her home town as opposed to the stark facts of how Höss and his men ran the camp, their utter indifference to the things that were done to other human beings and the end that the Poles and their tormentors came to.
This is an extraordinary piece of work. I was moved beyond anything else I've ever read about the Holocaust. This is such a powerful novel that should be on everyone's reading list.
Very highly recommended. It is a difficult book to stomach but all the more important for that reason.
Thankyou so very much to Netgalley and RB Media for the audio advance review copy. It felt like a privilege to read this.
March 29, 2025
“This is a work of fiction based on fact. In an attempt to bring to life a young life tragically lost, I have borrowed from Tadeuz Borowski’s brutal short story and from Janusz Korczak’s inspired children’s tale, I have invented a garden filled with roses for Hedwig Höss, the Auschwitz commander’s unconscionable wife, and, for Czesława, 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.”
~ Lily Tuck
“We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.”
~ Louise Glück
The rest is memory, and reimagining.
The only way in is away from the numbers.
Six million Poles were killed during the German occupation. Three million of them were Jews. Close to 1.9 million were non-Jews.
The mind, and our weary hearts, cannot wrap themselves around the tyranny of numbers. They feel unreal, monstrous, intangible. Like mathematical equations scribbled in chalk.
Like something made out of clouds.
But a heart can wrap around a face, a bruised lip, a tearful eye, a red triangle, 26947, a child.
One number, plucked out of many numbers.
One number landing on an immense artist’s heart.
Reimagining, over and over, is how artists save us.
It is how they put the childhood back into the child.
The one who stares back at us from the depths of brutality.
A relentless, shattering, redemptive work of art that feels like nothing less than a resurrection.
~ Lily Tuck
“We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.”
~ Louise Glück
The rest is memory, and reimagining.
The only way in is away from the numbers.
Six million Poles were killed during the German occupation. Three million of them were Jews. Close to 1.9 million were non-Jews.
The mind, and our weary hearts, cannot wrap themselves around the tyranny of numbers. They feel unreal, monstrous, intangible. Like mathematical equations scribbled in chalk.
Like something made out of clouds.
But a heart can wrap around a face, a bruised lip, a tearful eye, a red triangle, 26947, a child.
One number, plucked out of many numbers.
One number landing on an immense artist’s heart.
Reimagining, over and over, is how artists save us.
It is how they put the childhood back into the child.
The one who stares back at us from the depths of brutality.
A relentless, shattering, redemptive work of art that feels like nothing less than a resurrection.
October 31, 2024
This is a work of historical fiction based on an actual person named Czeslawa Kwoka. Kwoka was a 14 year old Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz on March 12, 1943. The author learned of Kwoka after Polish photographer Wilhelm Brasse died, and the photograph he took of Kwoka when she arrived at Auschwitz appeared in his obituary.
While this may be a fictional book, the horror of what happened to so many people during that time is very real. I am of Polish descent and have visited Poland many times, so I have a very keen interest in this part of history, and this type of historical fiction is one of my favorite genres.
Unfortunately, this was not one of my favorite books that I have read on this topic. Clearly it was intentional, but the author's writing style was very broken. The book reads like short pieces of news headlines, rather than a cohesive story. It jumps back and forth between time periods and has snippets interspersed in it about random actual people from that time. I just never got as invested in Kwoka's story as I could have been because of the style.
This is a very short read. I am a fast reader, but it took me less than an hour to read. And obviously, this is a very heavy topic and the book holds nothing back and can be quite difficult to read at times.
I received an advance review copy for free and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
While this may be a fictional book, the horror of what happened to so many people during that time is very real. I am of Polish descent and have visited Poland many times, so I have a very keen interest in this part of history, and this type of historical fiction is one of my favorite genres.
Unfortunately, this was not one of my favorite books that I have read on this topic. Clearly it was intentional, but the author's writing style was very broken. The book reads like short pieces of news headlines, rather than a cohesive story. It jumps back and forth between time periods and has snippets interspersed in it about random actual people from that time. I just never got as invested in Kwoka's story as I could have been because of the style.
This is a very short read. I am a fast reader, but it took me less than an hour to read. And obviously, this is a very heavy topic and the book holds nothing back and can be quite difficult to read at times.
I received an advance review copy for free and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
June 28, 2025
Only 54 pages long, but so well written and it's fiction based on fact. Unforgettable.
February 5, 2025
Oh, this book hurt my heart! The senselessness and obscenity of the violence. This book reads more like non-fiction in many ways, and as it was inspired by the photo of a real girl, Tuck effectively obfuscates the line between fact and fiction. The details observed... These are the things you can't get out of your head.
We Jews say, "Never forget." Alas, surveys show that less than a century later, a shocking number already have. Thank you, Lily Tuck for your witness.
We Jews say, "Never forget." Alas, surveys show that less than a century later, a shocking number already have. Thank you, Lily Tuck for your witness.
December 16, 2024
This was a very moving description of a young Catholic girl who was sent to Auschwitz.
January 17, 2025
This stunning small book is a challenge to categorize. It tells the imagined life story of a real 13-year-old Catholic Polish girl who died in Auschwitz, whose camp intake photo appears on the book cover, one of tens of thousands of photos taken by a fellow prisoner, who survived the camp and lived on for decades, until his obituary appeared in the New York Times, accompanied by some photos, including this one, and inspired the great novelist Lily Tuck to write this book.
We’re all of us aware of the Nazi’s odious campaign to kill all European Jews. The author’s note says that 300,000 Jewish Poles and 75,000 Catholic Poles lost their lives at Auschwitz alone. I was not aware of Hitler’s directives to essentially eradicate the Polish nation, stamping out Polish education, language and culture, expropriating land and evicting (and murdering) Polish farmers and others in order to create an “empty” country for Germans to populate and render Germanic. (At least the parts occupied by the Germans. The Soviets had their own terror campaigns on the go in the areas of the country they occupied.) Cselawa and her farming family were among the hundreds of thousands rounded up and sent off as slave labour or to death camps. Tuck alternates between the narrative of Cselawa’s specific story and the general tragedy of Poland, most of the latter derived from the Germans’ own appalling documentation. Shocking, at least to this not-well-informed non-historian.
We’re all of us aware of the Nazi’s odious campaign to kill all European Jews. The author’s note says that 300,000 Jewish Poles and 75,000 Catholic Poles lost their lives at Auschwitz alone. I was not aware of Hitler’s directives to essentially eradicate the Polish nation, stamping out Polish education, language and culture, expropriating land and evicting (and murdering) Polish farmers and others in order to create an “empty” country for Germans to populate and render Germanic. (At least the parts occupied by the Germans. The Soviets had their own terror campaigns on the go in the areas of the country they occupied.) Cselawa and her farming family were among the hundreds of thousands rounded up and sent off as slave labour or to death camps. Tuck alternates between the narrative of Cselawa’s specific story and the general tragedy of Poland, most of the latter derived from the Germans’ own appalling documentation. Shocking, at least to this not-well-informed non-historian.
December 13, 2024
Deepening the impact on humanizing the inhumanity towards millions (Wólka Złojecka, Zamość region, southeast Poland; Auschwitz concentration camp, Oświęcim, Poland; 1939 to 1943): How did Lily Tuck have the emotional fortitude to undertake, research, and write The Rest is Memory?
What does it say about Tuck that a photograph – the one on the cover of “prisoner number 26947,” Czeslawa Kwoka, a fourteen-year-old Polish Catholic girl at the center of this fictionalized yet tightly-knitted-to-history novel – became the impetus more than ten years ago for her eighth novel published at age 86? What it says, to me, is this is an author with conviction. An author to read and admire.
An author offering a different perspective than other Holocaust books you might compare it to. After all, Tuck already told us, “Living in other countries has given me a different perspective as a writer. It has heightened my sense of dislocation and rootlessness.” Heightening our sensibilities.
Remarkable, since this is likely the shortest book you might also compare it to at 144 pages. (My advanced reader copy 116). It brings to mind Holocaust survivor and Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s classic memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, published in 1946 at 165 pages, named one of the “ten most influential books in America.” What will be the legacy of the National Book Award winner (The News from Paraguay) and Guggenheim Fellow for the Creative Arts unique perspective on an unfathomable era of inhumanity?
Can we ever truly understand the madness and brutality of hatred? The terror, violence, torture, starvation, absence of sanitary conditions, rampant spread of diseases, the ravage to bodies and minds. Inflicted on human beings who’ve done nothing to you, whereas Hitler and his Nazi adherents were fanatically obsessed with erasing the Polish people. Not solely single-mindedly aimed at the Jewish people as this profoundly sobering novel presents but Catholics too, as well as Poland’s culture and entire country.
Next month, on January 27, 2025, the “80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz” will be observed. The third year in a row Russia is prohibited from attending due to Putin’s war crimes against the Ukrainian people in yet another, reverberating, grandiose plan to eradicate another European ethnic group, its culture, and country.
So, we ought to understand the chilling perspective Tuck has chosen. Czeslawa was arrested on December 13, 1942 with her mother Katarzyna, rounded up like cattle to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and thrown into an overcrowded barrack formerly a horse stable. (Animal imagery elicits cruelty and tender memories). Told to, “Forget your name. You are a number now,” Czeslawa, her mother, and other villagers from their town and region in Poland on a list, one of many. Tuck favors lists and numbers – facts. The lists intensify the sweeping inhumanity.
Hitler’s “repopulation” of Poland, we’re told, “did not include the Catholic Church.” Tuck breaks that down for us, from the abstract to the specific, by repeating the name of Czeslawa’s family church: Cathedral of the Resurrection of Our Lord and of St. Thomas the Apostle, emphasizing its significance. Honing in to a young priest at the church, part of Czeslawa’s memories, jolting us since his fate, like almost all the people we encounter not as a number but a person, is death. He was among the “3000 Polish clergy” killed.
When Czeslawa arrives at Auschwitz, she tells herself, “God made me because he loves me.” We bear witness to holding onto our faith when there’s nothing tangible left to hold onto. It’s the intangible – the memories Tuck has fictionalized. Memories of a simple, hard village life, with sprinklings of fairy-tales that hit you over the head with its farthermost contrasts to existing, trying to survive, at the largest of the “death camps” (combined with the Birkenau labor camp), notorious for its gas chambers. Death not fast or massive enough for Hitler, who declared, “Our strength lies in our speed and our brutality.” Hence, the invention of crematoriums. Using ovens to do the job in masses. Twenty minutes to incinerate live souls.
Hitler’s quote, from The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans, is like all the prose that’s footnoted at the bottom of the page leaving no doubt of its authenticity. It doesn’t distract; it adds and multiplies the intensity of Tuck’s prose. To her precision, clarity, starkness, sparseness.
Imagine being haunted by the picture on the cover? Czeslawa looks hollowed out, wearing an oversized black-and-white striped prison uniform hiding her emaciation. Her hair used to be blond, flowing down to her waist; her darkened stubbles caused by severe malnutrition. Her hair, one of the things she misses.
Czeclawa misses many other things, but her mother’s “stoic” and harsh upbringing (worsened around her crude, abusive, anti-Semitic husband, Czeslawa’s father Pawel) is painfully constrained. Had it been otherwise, she’d have been shot on the spot by Hitler’s ruthless guards.
Memories offer glimpses of Czeslawa’s yearnings. Of confiscated toy jacks. A “creamy karpatka (Polish cream pie).” A hen that laid “delicate blue eggs.” A white-leather Bible. A grandmother’s handsewn lace “white Holy Communion dress.” The solace of a 1933 children’s fantasy book, Kaytek the Wizard, the writer we learn perished in the Treblinka concentration camp, along with a list of other Polish writers representing “6000 intellectuals” wiped out. And a young man named Anton, who despite trying to sexually abuse her on a forbidden motorcycle ride, remains a powerful memory of What-If.
A more enduring romantic dream drifts in and out of her mother’s unraveling mind. It’s the memory of a young pilot “she fell in love with” falling from the sky. The imagery of floating, being uplifted evoked. (No love for a repugnant husband and father, though his daughter wonders what happened to him. We learn that too.)
“Photography was integral to the operation of some of the concentration camps.” Essential to the Nazi’s meticulous documentation of their horrors. Czeslawa’s piercing photograph among the 40,000 from Czeslawa’s region in Poland taken by a photographer, an Auschwitz prisoner too, Wilhelm Brasse.
When Czeslawa arrives at the camp it’s snowing. She opens her mouth to catch a “cold drink from heaven” showing the elegance of Puck’s range. Elegant words stick out since Tuck doesn’t mince words. Starting with the opening paragraph, when she tells us the Slavic meaning of her young protagonist’s name. A mix of “await” and “glory,” followed by, “What sort of glory awaits” Czeslawa? “A gas chamber? A gunshot to the head? An injection of ten or fifteen milliliters of phenol directly into the heart?” Lethal injections into young hearts an inexpensive method to murder children.
A Polish family outside the camp system is featured, reminding us of the brave souls who risked their lives in Poland’s underground resistance movement. Tuck’s description of Jan Zamoyski’s “elegant hand” so fitting. He’s from the “richest aristocratic and politically important family of Poland.” A list of his family’s contributions going back to the 16th century also here. His wife Róża saved “480 children” from a children’s concentration camp. Try to wrap your head around a concentration camp reserved for children.
The Nazis rabid burning of archives “to eradicate Polish culture” tragically also fitting. We shutter, thinking of the surge in book banning in America today.
Lily Tuck writes to be heard. Of the six million Polish people massacred, three million weren’t Jews. Her bracing words speak volumes.
What does it say about Tuck that a photograph – the one on the cover of “prisoner number 26947,” Czeslawa Kwoka, a fourteen-year-old Polish Catholic girl at the center of this fictionalized yet tightly-knitted-to-history novel – became the impetus more than ten years ago for her eighth novel published at age 86? What it says, to me, is this is an author with conviction. An author to read and admire.
An author offering a different perspective than other Holocaust books you might compare it to. After all, Tuck already told us, “Living in other countries has given me a different perspective as a writer. It has heightened my sense of dislocation and rootlessness.” Heightening our sensibilities.
Remarkable, since this is likely the shortest book you might also compare it to at 144 pages. (My advanced reader copy 116). It brings to mind Holocaust survivor and Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s classic memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, published in 1946 at 165 pages, named one of the “ten most influential books in America.” What will be the legacy of the National Book Award winner (The News from Paraguay) and Guggenheim Fellow for the Creative Arts unique perspective on an unfathomable era of inhumanity?
Can we ever truly understand the madness and brutality of hatred? The terror, violence, torture, starvation, absence of sanitary conditions, rampant spread of diseases, the ravage to bodies and minds. Inflicted on human beings who’ve done nothing to you, whereas Hitler and his Nazi adherents were fanatically obsessed with erasing the Polish people. Not solely single-mindedly aimed at the Jewish people as this profoundly sobering novel presents but Catholics too, as well as Poland’s culture and entire country.
Next month, on January 27, 2025, the “80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz” will be observed. The third year in a row Russia is prohibited from attending due to Putin’s war crimes against the Ukrainian people in yet another, reverberating, grandiose plan to eradicate another European ethnic group, its culture, and country.
So, we ought to understand the chilling perspective Tuck has chosen. Czeslawa was arrested on December 13, 1942 with her mother Katarzyna, rounded up like cattle to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and thrown into an overcrowded barrack formerly a horse stable. (Animal imagery elicits cruelty and tender memories). Told to, “Forget your name. You are a number now,” Czeslawa, her mother, and other villagers from their town and region in Poland on a list, one of many. Tuck favors lists and numbers – facts. The lists intensify the sweeping inhumanity.
Hitler’s “repopulation” of Poland, we’re told, “did not include the Catholic Church.” Tuck breaks that down for us, from the abstract to the specific, by repeating the name of Czeslawa’s family church: Cathedral of the Resurrection of Our Lord and of St. Thomas the Apostle, emphasizing its significance. Honing in to a young priest at the church, part of Czeslawa’s memories, jolting us since his fate, like almost all the people we encounter not as a number but a person, is death. He was among the “3000 Polish clergy” killed.
When Czeslawa arrives at Auschwitz, she tells herself, “God made me because he loves me.” We bear witness to holding onto our faith when there’s nothing tangible left to hold onto. It’s the intangible – the memories Tuck has fictionalized. Memories of a simple, hard village life, with sprinklings of fairy-tales that hit you over the head with its farthermost contrasts to existing, trying to survive, at the largest of the “death camps” (combined with the Birkenau labor camp), notorious for its gas chambers. Death not fast or massive enough for Hitler, who declared, “Our strength lies in our speed and our brutality.” Hence, the invention of crematoriums. Using ovens to do the job in masses. Twenty minutes to incinerate live souls.
Hitler’s quote, from The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans, is like all the prose that’s footnoted at the bottom of the page leaving no doubt of its authenticity. It doesn’t distract; it adds and multiplies the intensity of Tuck’s prose. To her precision, clarity, starkness, sparseness.
Imagine being haunted by the picture on the cover? Czeslawa looks hollowed out, wearing an oversized black-and-white striped prison uniform hiding her emaciation. Her hair used to be blond, flowing down to her waist; her darkened stubbles caused by severe malnutrition. Her hair, one of the things she misses.
Czeclawa misses many other things, but her mother’s “stoic” and harsh upbringing (worsened around her crude, abusive, anti-Semitic husband, Czeslawa’s father Pawel) is painfully constrained. Had it been otherwise, she’d have been shot on the spot by Hitler’s ruthless guards.
Memories offer glimpses of Czeslawa’s yearnings. Of confiscated toy jacks. A “creamy karpatka (Polish cream pie).” A hen that laid “delicate blue eggs.” A white-leather Bible. A grandmother’s handsewn lace “white Holy Communion dress.” The solace of a 1933 children’s fantasy book, Kaytek the Wizard, the writer we learn perished in the Treblinka concentration camp, along with a list of other Polish writers representing “6000 intellectuals” wiped out. And a young man named Anton, who despite trying to sexually abuse her on a forbidden motorcycle ride, remains a powerful memory of What-If.
A more enduring romantic dream drifts in and out of her mother’s unraveling mind. It’s the memory of a young pilot “she fell in love with” falling from the sky. The imagery of floating, being uplifted evoked. (No love for a repugnant husband and father, though his daughter wonders what happened to him. We learn that too.)
“Photography was integral to the operation of some of the concentration camps.” Essential to the Nazi’s meticulous documentation of their horrors. Czeslawa’s piercing photograph among the 40,000 from Czeslawa’s region in Poland taken by a photographer, an Auschwitz prisoner too, Wilhelm Brasse.
When Czeslawa arrives at the camp it’s snowing. She opens her mouth to catch a “cold drink from heaven” showing the elegance of Puck’s range. Elegant words stick out since Tuck doesn’t mince words. Starting with the opening paragraph, when she tells us the Slavic meaning of her young protagonist’s name. A mix of “await” and “glory,” followed by, “What sort of glory awaits” Czeslawa? “A gas chamber? A gunshot to the head? An injection of ten or fifteen milliliters of phenol directly into the heart?” Lethal injections into young hearts an inexpensive method to murder children.
A Polish family outside the camp system is featured, reminding us of the brave souls who risked their lives in Poland’s underground resistance movement. Tuck’s description of Jan Zamoyski’s “elegant hand” so fitting. He’s from the “richest aristocratic and politically important family of Poland.” A list of his family’s contributions going back to the 16th century also here. His wife Róża saved “480 children” from a children’s concentration camp. Try to wrap your head around a concentration camp reserved for children.
The Nazis rabid burning of archives “to eradicate Polish culture” tragically also fitting. We shutter, thinking of the surge in book banning in America today.
Lily Tuck writes to be heard. Of the six million Polish people massacred, three million weren’t Jews. Her bracing words speak volumes.
January 30, 2025
I had previously read a book by Lily Tuck that I enjoyed. I saw she had a new book recently released, so without checking into it, I decided to read it. The novel is set in Poland during World War II. Fourteen-year-old Czeslawa and several of her relatives are imprisoned in Auschwitz. They are Polish Catholics. Most do not survive. It is a sad story of starvation, atrocities, and death. It is short and well-written. Parts of it are gut-wrenching, so I recommend making sure you are in the right head space to read it.
December 7, 2024
There isn’t anything flowery here to soften each blow. These aren’t invented characters assigned false heroics. This a brutal, realistic imagining of a young girl’s life, blended with many other lives, that were all exterminated in Auschwitz. If you want a beautiful book, don’t read this. It will not make you comfortable, touch your heart, or let you cry tears for someone who never existed. It’s a knife, rusty and jagged, with truth carved into its blade.
I am immensely grateful to Recorded Books and NetGalley for my copy. All opinions are my own.
I am immensely grateful to Recorded Books and NetGalley for my copy. All opinions are my own.
September 30, 2024
This is a review of an Advanced Reading Copy. I felt like I was reading notes taken for a class. Everything seemed random and out of chronological order or something. It made it very hard to want to read and finish the book. It did not flow like a story. Hopefully the finished book comes together because it could be a beautiful book.
January 19, 2025
Sad historical fiction based on just a few months that this 14 year old Catholic Polish girl spent at Auschwitz before her death. The writing was good, but very disjointed. It is a short novel but the timeline and events go back and forth. The book is full of the sorrow and desperate feelings these prisoners must have endured on a daily basis. Very depressing.
January 27, 2025
I read this because I am interested in the literature of witness. How do you write about the unthinkable in a way that conveys the enormity of events yet does not completely overwhelm the reader? The problem that particularly interests me is way that even in the process of revealing, words cushion and distance.
Tuck’s solution is to look at a small group of historical but obscure Catholic women and teens from southeastern Poland who were caught in the Polish genocide by Germany and Russia during WWII, and imagine what their lives were like before and after they were deported to Auschwitz. She interweaves what is known and imagined about them with historically documented facts about their home province in Poland, about Auschwitz, and about the Polish military during the war. Tuck’s writing style is spare and journalistic. The historical facts appear in seemingly random order, with many abrupt changes of focus. The book mostly consists of short segments—often just a sentence or two—and reads like a collection of footnotes to history. In a way, that is what Tuck is giving us: a spare story made up of footnotes. But she manages to craft a kind of narrative from them by always winding her way back to the thread that makes up the life of her central character, Czesława Kwoka. Tuck conjures Czsława’s childhood on her family’s farm and deportation to and experiences at Auschwitz.
At first I liked neither the apparent randomness nor the abrupt shifts of focus, in the book, but as I read I came to feel that Tuck was using these to evoke the chaos and random cruelty of the genocide, and by extension, of the entire Nazi regime. I'm not completely sure that is her purpose, nor am I certain that, if it is, that the strategy wholly succeeds. However, the strategy of interleaving historical facts with the plausibly imagined experiences of real, ordinary Polish women helped me to grasp the attempt to erase Poland in a way that I had not done while reading strictly historical accounts. For me the book was particularly successful in taking what are by now well-attested statistics and translating them into human experience, something that is very hard to do.
I don’t know if this type of hybrid genre has a name. I think of it as a documentary novel. I’ve read several works of historical scholarship that have tried to do something similar—get at the lived experience of people whose experience and existence was deemed unimportant, and so was little (if at all) documented. A few of those books worked; others stretched too far and were little more than wishful thinking, so it was interesting to read a book that attempts something similar, but starts at the fiction end of the continuum.
This is not an easy novel to read. The choppiness, while arguably supportive of the purpose of the book, makes for difficult reading at times. It is emotionally draining, but definitely worth reading.
3.5 stars.
Tuck’s solution is to look at a small group of historical but obscure Catholic women and teens from southeastern Poland who were caught in the Polish genocide by Germany and Russia during WWII, and imagine what their lives were like before and after they were deported to Auschwitz. She interweaves what is known and imagined about them with historically documented facts about their home province in Poland, about Auschwitz, and about the Polish military during the war. Tuck’s writing style is spare and journalistic. The historical facts appear in seemingly random order, with many abrupt changes of focus. The book mostly consists of short segments—often just a sentence or two—and reads like a collection of footnotes to history. In a way, that is what Tuck is giving us: a spare story made up of footnotes. But she manages to craft a kind of narrative from them by always winding her way back to the thread that makes up the life of her central character, Czesława Kwoka. Tuck conjures Czsława’s childhood on her family’s farm and deportation to and experiences at Auschwitz.
At first I liked neither the apparent randomness nor the abrupt shifts of focus, in the book, but as I read I came to feel that Tuck was using these to evoke the chaos and random cruelty of the genocide, and by extension, of the entire Nazi regime. I'm not completely sure that is her purpose, nor am I certain that, if it is, that the strategy wholly succeeds. However, the strategy of interleaving historical facts with the plausibly imagined experiences of real, ordinary Polish women helped me to grasp the attempt to erase Poland in a way that I had not done while reading strictly historical accounts. For me the book was particularly successful in taking what are by now well-attested statistics and translating them into human experience, something that is very hard to do.
I don’t know if this type of hybrid genre has a name. I think of it as a documentary novel. I’ve read several works of historical scholarship that have tried to do something similar—get at the lived experience of people whose experience and existence was deemed unimportant, and so was little (if at all) documented. A few of those books worked; others stretched too far and were little more than wishful thinking, so it was interesting to read a book that attempts something similar, but starts at the fiction end of the continuum.
This is not an easy novel to read. The choppiness, while arguably supportive of the purpose of the book, makes for difficult reading at times. It is emotionally draining, but definitely worth reading.
3.5 stars.
December 20, 2024
Liked the concept, but couldn’t get behind the writing style
January 29, 2025
Stark and heartbreaking. The writing style threw me for a loop, but I soon lost myself in the story.
December 17, 2024
This was a quick audio listen for me, poignantly and beautifully read…
How does one comment on a book like this? I’m still processing and trying to gather my thoughts…I read/listen to more German WWII HF than other genres, a way of learning more about what my own father, a WWII US POW held in a German POW camp in Poland, could have experienced, as it was something he was understandably very close mouthed about.
This isa mostly fiction book…imagined by the author after she saw an exhibit of photographs taken by Auschwitz prison photographer, Wilhelm Brasse. Tuck was stricken by several pictures of young 14 y/o Czeslawa Kwoka’s piercing look among the 40,000 photographs in the exhibit and vowed to research the young girl. Photography was apparently integral to the operation of some of the concentration camps, an essential meticulous documentation of Nazi horrors. “Forget your name, you are a number now…”
We know of the “Angel of Death,”Josef Mengele’s human experimentation on Auschwitz concentration camp women, children, twins, individuals with heterochromia iridum, injecting individuals with typhus germs and other insane things. Tuck incorporates Mengele, as well as Rudolph Hoss, the Auschwitz camp commander, into The Rest is Memory in often graphic detail.
What particularly struck me is my ignorance about the vast number of Catholic Poles…young Czeslawa and her mother among them…who were transported to the concentration camps as part of Hitler’s plan to make Poland a completely Germanic land. We are aware that Pope Pius XII “consistently looked the other way” at Hitler’s egregious actions, all while many of the Catholic faith were being led to the gas chambers, along with Jewish, Romani and other “less desirable” peoples.
The naiveté of Czeslawa and others in Memory is often hard to listen to, let alone forget. It is gutting, it is haunting and it is a beautiful tribute to a young woman and so, so many more…young and old…who never had the chance to live their hopes, their dreams, see their children grow to adulthood and so much more. I may never be able to see snow falling again without opening my mouth, trying to catch a snowflake on my tongue and think of young Czeslawa…❄️
How does one comment on a book like this? I’m still processing and trying to gather my thoughts…I read/listen to more German WWII HF than other genres, a way of learning more about what my own father, a WWII US POW held in a German POW camp in Poland, could have experienced, as it was something he was understandably very close mouthed about.
This isa mostly fiction book…imagined by the author after she saw an exhibit of photographs taken by Auschwitz prison photographer, Wilhelm Brasse. Tuck was stricken by several pictures of young 14 y/o Czeslawa Kwoka’s piercing look among the 40,000 photographs in the exhibit and vowed to research the young girl. Photography was apparently integral to the operation of some of the concentration camps, an essential meticulous documentation of Nazi horrors. “Forget your name, you are a number now…”
We know of the “Angel of Death,”Josef Mengele’s human experimentation on Auschwitz concentration camp women, children, twins, individuals with heterochromia iridum, injecting individuals with typhus germs and other insane things. Tuck incorporates Mengele, as well as Rudolph Hoss, the Auschwitz camp commander, into The Rest is Memory in often graphic detail.
What particularly struck me is my ignorance about the vast number of Catholic Poles…young Czeslawa and her mother among them…who were transported to the concentration camps as part of Hitler’s plan to make Poland a completely Germanic land. We are aware that Pope Pius XII “consistently looked the other way” at Hitler’s egregious actions, all while many of the Catholic faith were being led to the gas chambers, along with Jewish, Romani and other “less desirable” peoples.
The naiveté of Czeslawa and others in Memory is often hard to listen to, let alone forget. It is gutting, it is haunting and it is a beautiful tribute to a young woman and so, so many more…young and old…who never had the chance to live their hopes, their dreams, see their children grow to adulthood and so much more. I may never be able to see snow falling again without opening my mouth, trying to catch a snowflake on my tongue and think of young Czeslawa…❄️
January 22, 2025
Tuck pairs facts and lists about the Holocaust and the brutal invasion of Poland with fictionalized fragments filling in the real-life story of a Catholic Polish teenager, Czesława, killed at Auschwitz. Not much is known about Czesława's life, beyond a photograph taken when she arrived at Auschwitz and a few, brief notes taken by the photographer. The nonlinear format evokes the randomness of memory, but it also leaves Czesława and others feeling like vaguely formed sketches. Sometimes Tuck's structural choices can create powerful moments or jarring juxtapositions, but more often it feels like reading someone's unedited research notes, which can be quite cold and distant. And even still, the final sentence brought tears to my eyes.
May 23, 2025
This is a short historical novel, incredibly well written.
This story brings back to life a fourteen year old Polish girl, Czeslawa, who dies in Auschwitz.
The known facts of her life are few and far between. The photograph on the cover of the audiobook is an actual picture of her, taken as she entered Auschwitz, Her beautiful hair is shaved, a blemish on her lips is likely where she was hit by a guard. This picture is the only proof we have that Czeslawa was in Auschwitz and died in Auschwitz.
The story details a young girl's life growing up in Poland during the time leading up to the Nazi invasion. It’s a short audiobook, however, it shocks you with the horror of man’s inhumanity to man. Children could not be children. Simple playing could get a child killed.
Author Lily Tuck mentioned Wilhelm Brasse as a photographer in Auschwitz. It’s now on my TBR list and Ms. Tuck is also on my watch/read list.
The Auschwitz Photographer
The powerful true story of Wilhelm Brasse prisoner number 3444
by Luca Crippa, Maurizio Onnis
This story brings back to life a fourteen year old Polish girl, Czeslawa, who dies in Auschwitz.
The known facts of her life are few and far between. The photograph on the cover of the audiobook is an actual picture of her, taken as she entered Auschwitz, Her beautiful hair is shaved, a blemish on her lips is likely where she was hit by a guard. This picture is the only proof we have that Czeslawa was in Auschwitz and died in Auschwitz.
The story details a young girl's life growing up in Poland during the time leading up to the Nazi invasion. It’s a short audiobook, however, it shocks you with the horror of man’s inhumanity to man. Children could not be children. Simple playing could get a child killed.
Author Lily Tuck mentioned Wilhelm Brasse as a photographer in Auschwitz. It’s now on my TBR list and Ms. Tuck is also on my watch/read list.
The Auschwitz Photographer
The powerful true story of Wilhelm Brasse prisoner number 3444
by Luca Crippa, Maurizio Onnis
June 10, 2025
I don't even know where or how to review this. The photo of Czesława Kwoka on the cover breaks my heart every time I see it. She looks so tiny. The fact that her and so many other children were denied the right to grow up and grow old because of unfathomable evil and cruelty fills me with so much anger despair. If Hell exists, a brand new circle surely had to be added to it just for the Nazis.
Fuck fascism. Fuck Nazis.
Fuck fascism. Fuck Nazis.
Read
February 28, 2025A harrowing semi-fictional testimony that brings tears to the eyes, told in a diary-like form that seamlessly intertwines real historical events with the personal micro-histories of ordinary people, whose misfortune was being born at the most nightmarish times of modern history. Scraps of true facts and authentic testimonies blend with fragments of everyday memory - those small yet vital threads that tether us to survival - while past, present, and future gradually unravel into an inseparable tangle. A definite must-read.
February 25, 2025
3 hour audiobook that absolutely crushed me and ruined my day but it’s such a good well written book
March 29, 2025
A thousand stars.
Full rtc
Full rtc
April 11, 2025
This short novel packs a punch (in the gut)! It centers around a 14 year old Polish girl sent to Auschwitz. I will be looking for more books by this author.
December 28, 2024
Beautiful for several reasons, but most importantly the life breathed into the little girl whose legacy was reduced to a number.
December 26, 2024
I will also do a video review here at my channel: http://www.youtube.com/magicofbooks
After reading the obituary of Polish photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took over 40,000 pictures of the prisoners at Auschwitz, author Lily Tuck discovered the photo of fourteen-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, and felt inspired to write this fictional tale of what the life of this young girl could have been like and what she might have endured during her brief three months at Auschwitz.
I feel like a terrible person for giving this book 2-stars. I just did not like how this book was handled. This book is described as being fictional, because all we know about this young girl is her name, age, where she lived, her religion (Catholic), and that she was at Auschwitz. I like that Lily Tuck felt this emotional inspiration to write about this young girl and give her a voice, give her a history, though we know nothing about her. So many people were stripped of their identities during World War II, and this book is a small way to give this girl her identity back and to be remembered. I don't have a problem with any of that. What I have a problem with is that this book feels like a textbook with little snippets of fact sprinkled in as small paragraphs and then Czeslawa's fictional story woven is on top of it. The narrative felt terribly clunky and all over the place. They best way I can describe this book is that it felt like the "stream of consciousness" literary technique which I absolutely abhor with a passion. Lily Tuck needed to pick what this book was: did she want it to be a fictional tale of this teenage girl? Or did she want it to be nonfiction? The style of this book just did not work for me whatsoever. For the most part, I did enjoy the parts with Czeslawa and her mother, some of her possible backstory prior to going to Auschwitz, and everything she had to endure at the camp and the people she interacted with and the things they witnessed. Again, the structure of this book had a neverending flow of mini-paragraphs that would just move from one thought to the next. One subject to the next, making everything like "stream of consciousness." Reading this book was a very disjointed experience. I wanted to love this. But I think the whole premise of this book was executed quite horrifically into a jumbled mess that never worked. I absolutely appreciate now knowing Czeslawa Kwoka and how tragically short lived her life was, but this novel was not the way to do it. I do not recommend picking this book up unless you are genuinely curious about it. I much rather you read actual Holocaust memoirs in place of this.
After reading the obituary of Polish photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took over 40,000 pictures of the prisoners at Auschwitz, author Lily Tuck discovered the photo of fourteen-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, and felt inspired to write this fictional tale of what the life of this young girl could have been like and what she might have endured during her brief three months at Auschwitz.
I feel like a terrible person for giving this book 2-stars. I just did not like how this book was handled. This book is described as being fictional, because all we know about this young girl is her name, age, where she lived, her religion (Catholic), and that she was at Auschwitz. I like that Lily Tuck felt this emotional inspiration to write about this young girl and give her a voice, give her a history, though we know nothing about her. So many people were stripped of their identities during World War II, and this book is a small way to give this girl her identity back and to be remembered. I don't have a problem with any of that. What I have a problem with is that this book feels like a textbook with little snippets of fact sprinkled in as small paragraphs and then Czeslawa's fictional story woven is on top of it. The narrative felt terribly clunky and all over the place. They best way I can describe this book is that it felt like the "stream of consciousness" literary technique which I absolutely abhor with a passion. Lily Tuck needed to pick what this book was: did she want it to be a fictional tale of this teenage girl? Or did she want it to be nonfiction? The style of this book just did not work for me whatsoever. For the most part, I did enjoy the parts with Czeslawa and her mother, some of her possible backstory prior to going to Auschwitz, and everything she had to endure at the camp and the people she interacted with and the things they witnessed. Again, the structure of this book had a neverending flow of mini-paragraphs that would just move from one thought to the next. One subject to the next, making everything like "stream of consciousness." Reading this book was a very disjointed experience. I wanted to love this. But I think the whole premise of this book was executed quite horrifically into a jumbled mess that never worked. I absolutely appreciate now knowing Czeslawa Kwoka and how tragically short lived her life was, but this novel was not the way to do it. I do not recommend picking this book up unless you are genuinely curious about it. I much rather you read actual Holocaust memoirs in place of this.
February 17, 2025
My dislike of this book has nothing to do with Czesława or her story. This review has everything to do with the writing.
Typically, when it comes to books about Holocaust survivors or victims, I automatically rate it a 5-star because how could you rate it any less. Well. Now I know how. The writing in this book is disjointed and does not follow any sort of direct timeline. The timeline and the focus jump around so much that it feels like someone is creating a mind map for what they want to cover in their book. While this is something some may enjoy, to me, it felt like the author was creating headlines. Additionally, while the story centers around Czesława, it is not necessarily about her. The author covers many people and how they connect to her but also provides little information. Much of the information you get from this book feels like, and most likely is, what the author thought the period was like and how the subjects of this story would have interacted. I understand that we will never know most of the stories of every victim, I would assume that if you chose to focus on one particular victim, you would, possibly, do so in a way that honors their life. How do we know if her father hit her, or had a distasteful view of every woman but his wife? How do we know that she was scared of him? How do we know that her mother rubbed cow urine over a rash she had as a child? How do we know that a boy Anton told her to undress and left her on the side of the road when she said no? While historical fiction is fine and one of my favorite genres, this felt disrespectful. I will be looking for other books that are about Czesława and/or ethnic Poles and their plights during the Holocaust; I find it very doubtful that I will ever read this author again.
Typically, when it comes to books about Holocaust survivors or victims, I automatically rate it a 5-star because how could you rate it any less. Well. Now I know how. The writing in this book is disjointed and does not follow any sort of direct timeline. The timeline and the focus jump around so much that it feels like someone is creating a mind map for what they want to cover in their book. While this is something some may enjoy, to me, it felt like the author was creating headlines. Additionally, while the story centers around Czesława, it is not necessarily about her. The author covers many people and how they connect to her but also provides little information. Much of the information you get from this book feels like, and most likely is, what the author thought the period was like and how the subjects of this story would have interacted. I understand that we will never know most of the stories of every victim, I would assume that if you chose to focus on one particular victim, you would, possibly, do so in a way that honors their life. How do we know if her father hit her, or had a distasteful view of every woman but his wife? How do we know that she was scared of him? How do we know that her mother rubbed cow urine over a rash she had as a child? How do we know that a boy Anton told her to undress and left her on the side of the road when she said no? While historical fiction is fine and one of my favorite genres, this felt disrespectful. I will be looking for other books that are about Czesława and/or ethnic Poles and their plights during the Holocaust; I find it very doubtful that I will ever read this author again.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 1, 2025
A sobering story. The story follows a young Polish Catholic girl during World War II. Many parts were hard to think about and even begin to imagine. The reality of the concentration camps is incredibly painful.
November 30, 2024
How do you tell the story of an unfinished life?
The Rest is Memory 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.
The Rest is Memory 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--When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank--which is almost on the complete opposite spectrum of storytelling.
Whereas When We Flew Away coats everything in a stuffy lyrical gloss and creates metaphorical beings out of the real life figures depicted in its pages, The Rest is Memory 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 The Rest is Memory will be placed in the years to come, as WW2 breaks away from its last threads of living memory and what was once controversial enough that it garnered news articles--basing a novel on a victim of Nazism who did not survive to tell their true story--becomes more of a norm.
I can say I would recommend it if you are looking for a WW2 historical fiction that isn't overly flowery or glossy.
Yet it is one of the more poignant details in the novel that has stuck with me the most--one which came to mind as I walked home last evening as a late November snow began to fall: Czeslawa, 14 years old, orphaned, dying of starvation in a concentration camp, sticking her tongue out to catch falling snow.
The Rest is Memory 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.
The Rest is Memory 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--When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank--which is almost on the complete opposite spectrum of storytelling.
Whereas When We Flew Away coats everything in a stuffy lyrical gloss and creates metaphorical beings out of the real life figures depicted in its pages, The Rest is Memory 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 The Rest is Memory will be placed in the years to come, as WW2 breaks away from its last threads of living memory and what was once controversial enough that it garnered news articles--basing a novel on a victim of Nazism who did not survive to tell their true story--becomes more of a norm.
I can say I would recommend it if you are looking for a WW2 historical fiction that isn't overly flowery or glossy.
Yet it is one of the more poignant details in the novel that has stuck with me the most--one which came to mind as I walked home last evening as a late November snow began to fall: Czeslawa, 14 years old, orphaned, dying of starvation in a concentration camp, sticking her tongue out to catch falling snow.
June 28, 2025
I don't know how anyone can read a story like this...and not be incredibly angry...that people were treated like this...not only that so many died but the absolute horrors and torture they had to suffer. I don't know how anyone can read this in 2025 and not see how dangerous a path we are on in America.
Taking one star off because I would have greatly preferred if the author had not used a real person as the main character in this fictional story...someone who didn't give any kind of consent to have their name and story taken this way. It feels icky to me and I don't think it made the story any better than if the author had just used a completely fictional character (which this was except for the use of real people's names as the main characters). I can understand being inspired by a real person and choosing to tell a fictional story...but I don't care for how this was done.
I spent most of my time reading this thinking it was a true story and while I didn't love some of the writing choices I kept thinking to myself that this was someone's real story and who am I to judge...but then finding out it is mostly a work of fiction I feel like its OK to say that there are parts that could have been done better. The way the "memories" were inserted throughout this book felt kind of clunky.
I keep going back and forth on my rating for this...I think it falls at a 3.5 and I'm rounding down because I personally don't see myself choosing to read this again. But my personal issues are mine and detailed above. Overall its a well written story that held my attention and its a quick read which I think makes it accessible to a lot of people. I'm not mad I read it and may look into some of the authors other works to read in the future.
Taking one star off because I would have greatly preferred if the author had not used a real person as the main character in this fictional story...someone who didn't give any kind of consent to have their name and story taken this way. It feels icky to me and I don't think it made the story any better than if the author had just used a completely fictional character (which this was except for the use of real people's names as the main characters). I can understand being inspired by a real person and choosing to tell a fictional story...but I don't care for how this was done.
I spent most of my time reading this thinking it was a true story and while I didn't love some of the writing choices I kept thinking to myself that this was someone's real story and who am I to judge...but then finding out it is mostly a work of fiction I feel like its OK to say that there are parts that could have been done better. The way the "memories" were inserted throughout this book felt kind of clunky.
I keep going back and forth on my rating for this...I think it falls at a 3.5 and I'm rounding down because I personally don't see myself choosing to read this again. But my personal issues are mine and detailed above. Overall its a well written story that held my attention and its a quick read which I think makes it accessible to a lot of people. I'm not mad I read it and may look into some of the authors other works to read in the future.
March 11, 2025
Along with murdering six million Jews in the Holocaust, Hitler also made it his mission to destroy Poland and its people. In this slim novel, author Lily Tuck intersperses fictionalized moments in the life of a 14-year-old Polish Catholic girl, Czeslawa Kwoka, with true facts and figures about Auschwitz, and the slaughter of Jews and others by the Nazis. The book is not a story; more like a series of paragraphs going between a true account or fact, and giving a fictionalized voice to Czeslawa, both before her time at Auschwitz and during her captivity. It is a simple, stunning work that still manages to shock, even if you are familiar with the atrocities of the Holocaust. I've been to Auschwitz, and I was still horrified. But this short book is important, not just because it documents Nazi brutality, but because it lets a little girl live once again. I know I won't ever forget Czeslawa.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 268 reviews