Award Winning Author Reveals New Novel Was Sparked by a Single Image of Young Girl

Tragically, it happened: the holocaust that killed eleven million innocent people in World War 11.

From “Schindler’s List” to “Sophies Choice” the unimaginable horror has also formed the backdrop for some riveting works of cinema and literature which continues to this day.

Among the latest, Jesse Eisenberg is starring in ”A Royal Pain,” which he also wrote and directed. In the film, he and his cousin, played by Kieran Culkin, visit Poland to see the house their beloved grandmother lived in before becoming a victim of the tragedy. Did I mention it’s sort of a comedy? And Adrian Brody is back on screen in “The Brutalist,” about a Hungarian Jewish architect and World War Two survivor. Did I mention it’s almost four hours long?

And now, Lily Tuck, an Upper East Side woman of 86, has just published her latest, a short novel, “The Rest Is Memory,” about a 14-year-old Polish girl who ended up in Auschwitz. And did I mention she was Catholic?

Eisenberg’s movie is picking up Oscar buzz, (particularly for Culkin) as is “The Brutalist.” And Tuck’s novella also is being taken very seriously. The New York Times called it “deeply impressive,” The New Yorker “ a slender potent novel,” and the Los Angeles Times raved that, “the layering of fact and fiction is cunning.”

The book arrives thanks to the Live Right imprint of W. W. Norton & Co. “They took it immediately,” says Tuck, who has published six previous novels: “Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up,” “The Woman Who Walked on Water,” “Siam: Or The Woman Who Shot A Man,” (a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), “I Married You For Happiness” “Sisters” and “The News from Paraguay,” winner of the 2004 National Book Award for fiction.

“I didn’t get a lot of money for it,” she says of her latest novella, “but that’s okay. It’s an unusual book...half fact and half fiction, short and easy to read. Women usually like my books, but I must say this one is appealing to a lot of men as well.”

Most of us know that hideous death toll and the world’s most infamous death camp is not spared in this book. But Tuck’s fiction is her imagining the life of a teenage girl who died after three years there. How did she find her leading character? “I read an obituary of the official photographer of prisoners,” explains the author. “In one, there was a picture of this girl. I cut it out and I was struck by the innocent, very beautiful little face and the lost life.” All it said was she died at Auschwitz.” The photographer—himself a prisoner—took some 40,000 photos.

From there, it was about how that girl, named Czeslawa Kwok, may have lived. Tuck did not visit the camp, though she did pore through an official book—”The Holocaust Library at Auschwitz”—that one can order from there. “But I tried not to read anyone’s memoir or really anything,” she says. “I wanted to come as fresh as I could to the page.”

Her own pages can be difficult to read, as when Tuck writes, “After a hot steam bath that scalds her flesh and a cold shower that freezes it, she’s given a striped blue and gray pants and shirt to match that are too large for her and a pair of wooden clogs. Czeslawa is then tattooed on her left forearm. ‘Forget your name,” the guard tells her. ‘You’re a number now—two, six, nine, four, seven.” It is also the first moment that 14-year-old Czeslawa realizes that all she knows may be useless.”

It is not like Lily Tuck’s own family was unimpacted. “My parents both had to leave France because they were Germans of Jewish origin,” she says. “My mother and I went to Peru: my father went into the French Foreign Legion. They left everything they owned in Paris. When they got discovered, we immigrated here in 1947. My mother wouldn’t even admit she was German. She described herself as European.” Like so many others who grew up with parents of wartime atrocities, “my parents didn’t talk about it,” she says. “And I regret not asking more questions.”

I get it. I grew up in sunny Santa Monica and never asked my father why we had fancy Japanese swords on the wall. I only found out when I traveled with him to Japan to return those swords some 30 years after the war. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/daughters-memory/

One of the important things about Lily Tuck’s truth-telling novel is that it speaks about a young person’s experience. (And not that girl with the Diary) While not necessarily a book for children, it is a way for young people to digest the hideous details. Surveys have shown that a high percentage of students are not even aware of what happened in the camps. Which is the reason that the J.C.C of Rochester commissioned playwright and former TV producer Wendy Kout to write a play called “Survivors.” There were—and are—many in that area, and Kout tells their stories in a moving piece which features young actors relating the harrowing stories. “Survivors” is being performed in museums and schools across the country.

Who knows why all this now...? Well, maybe we do know. “The ideology that led to Auschwitz–had roots in other lands,” says Jason Stanley, renowned professor at Yale. “Hitler was much taken by the example of the United States, which in Mein Kampf he describes as the young nation closest to realizing a “national state” in his favoured sense. The Nazis admired America’s racial ideology, and our “race science.”

Hearing the stories of those who survived, or perished, at Auschwitz, whether on a stage, a screen, in a classroom, or in a powerful new novel, it’s hard to ever forget. And that’s the idea.

Michele Willens is the author of “From Mouseketeers to Menopause.”