In ‘The Rest Is Memory,’ a photo drives novelist to imagine the life of girl who died in Auschwitz

A black-and-white photograph of a young girl. Her hair has been roughly shaved. She has a bruise under her lower lip. She is wearing a striped concentration camp uniform. On the shirt, her number is discernible: 26947. Photographer Wilhelm Brasse’s camera doesn’t lie: His subject stares straight ahead, not with indifference or defiance but fear.

Ten years ago, writer Lily Tuck came across this photograph when reading Brasse’s obituary. While he was interned at Auschwitz, he took more than 40,000 pictures of his fellow prisoners. One of them was of Czeslawa Kwoka, a 14-year-old Polish Catholic girl. After discovering only bare-bones facts about Czeslawa, Tuck decided to write a novel that imagined her life and charted her fate. The result, “The Rest Is Memory,” is an extraordinary achievement.

At the beginning of the book, Tuck depicts Czeslawa helping her parents on their farm in southeast Poland and going for country rides on the back of local boy Anton’s motorcycle. But Czeslawa’s world implodes when the Nazis invade, close her school and start expelling Poles from their land to make room for German settlers. Some Poles are sent to the fatherland to be “germanized” and some are enslaved as laborers. Czeslawa and her mother are put in the group bound for Auschwitz.

On her arrival there in December 1942, guards strip her of her dignity and then her identity. “Forget your name,” one of them tells her. “You are a number now.” She is assigned arduous work in cold temperatures and given scant and barely edible food. After grueling days, she and her mother get what sleep they can in overcrowded accommodation: A stable that once housed 55 horses is now a barrack accommodating 400 women.

Czeslawa tries to avoid illness, for deteriorating health and reduced productivity will result in the gas chamber. Unfortunately and inevitably, she gets sick. Three months after entering and trying to endure this frozen hell, she is put to death — but not before rebelling against her captors with one small, yet significantly transgressive act.

“The Rest Is Memory” is deeply upsetting in places, particularly when we hear of the brutal exploits of camp commander Rudolf Höss and his equally sadistic henchmen. Tuck deserves credit for not softening the blows and diluting the atrocities.

Tuck also deserves praise for her structure. Like much of her output, including her mesmerizing “The Double Life of Liliane,” her book is a hybrid work that deftly mixes fact and fiction and blurs genres and boundaries. The nonlinear narrative darts backward and forward, and routinely fragments into a series of vignettes comprising meditations, profiles and potted histories, many of which chronicle the tragic plights of other characters.

“The Rest Is Memory” could have been a crude drama, fashioned from a stolen identity. Instead, Tuck has sensitively and skillfully created a memorial to a life cut short while shining necessary light on the darkest chapter of the 20th century.

Malcolm Forbes, who also has written for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The Rest Is Memory

By: Lily Tuck.

Publisher: Liveright, 116 pages, $24.99.