”The Rest Is Memory,” by Lily Tuck. Publisher: Liveright, 116 pages, $24.99.
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 basic facts about her, Tuck decided to write a novel that imagined her life and charted her fate. The result, “The Rest Is Memory,” is an extraordinary achievement. 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 her 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 no.
