Lily Tuck's new novel, The Rest Is Memory is a spare and heartbreaking story about a young Polish girl who perishes at Auschwitz. A victim of Hitler's plan to eradicate the Polish population, Czeslawa and her mother, Katarzyna, are swept up with others from their village and transported to Auschwitz where they undergo a selection process that divides them into those who are killed immediately and those who become laborers. Czeslawa and her mother are in the latter category, languishing for months while suffering from disease and malnutrition in a crowded barracks filled with the other women from their community. By day, they are forced to dig silt out of a pond.

Although Tuck's novella is a chronicle of what Czeslawa and her mother endured, it is also a record of Hitler's rational and systematic plan to expunge Poles from Poland, and the chief actors at Auschwitz who put that plan into effect.

It surprised me that The Rest is Memory is such a compelling and compulsively readable novella. Tuck knows that the facts, even when stated blandly, as she tends to do, are painful to consider, and so in practical ways, she makes the story bearable.

First, the narrative is a loose weave of several different strands. One is factual information, consisting of lists and mostly objective descriptions, the other is the interior thoughts and memories of her two central characters, and the third is dialog between the women in the barracks. Each strand in this weave is short and each is separated by a double space that creates a visual respite between blocks of black text. This white space is crucial. Not only does it separate the different strands, it creates pauses that act as breathing spaces for the reader.

The other tool that turned this record of atrocity into a story I wanted to read is her choice of the present tense. As she shows characters experiencing conditions that ended in 1945, the present tense gives them a mundane ordinariness that normalizes them. For instance, Czeslawa experiences deep regret for the lies she told another girl in their village and for her treatment of the family dog, a creature she never befriended. These thoughts torment her in a manner equal to all of her physical torments: the fleas, lice, rashes, and hunger.

The present tense also creates a sense of immediacy. It does not offer the consolation that something is finished but instead, suggests continuance. Published in 2025, during the early days of our new presidency, the sense of continuance in Tuck's novella creates a fear we can easily relate to as we watch the wrecking ball in our own country topple the democratic norms, policies, and institutions that have, for so long, supported our sense of ourselves and our place within the world. Months of chaos have robbed us of the normal that was then, this is now confidence as we imagine our own slide into autocracy. This blanketing of panic tends to rob us of particularity, the gritty surfaces and beautiful details of daily life, but Tuck's novel helps to refresh them, bringing us back to ourselves.

What sustains Czeslawa are the particulars of memory, details that take us into the rural childhood she now yearns for. The excerpt I've chosen is from early in the novella, but it is representative of the overall weave of memory, dialog, and historical fact. Note the sustenance that the children's talk of food creates and how, for the reader, these specific memories balance the abstract horror of the "fact paragraph." Note also the shift in tense—present to past—in the "fact paragraph."

Czeslawa thinks about her hen, Kinga.

"What she would do for a single egg?"

"For breakfast, I had porridge with milk," Czeslawa tells Krystyna. "Then for lunch I had borscht, bacon and—

"For lunch I had fried fatback and sauerkraut," Krystyna interrupts Czeslawa.

"For dinner, I had potato soup and bread," Czeslawa continues.

"I wonder where my mother is," Krystyna says.

To eradicate Polish culture, the Germans shut down the schools and universities, seized the press, confiscated the art in museums, burned the archives, and removed all the monuments and statues to Polish heroes. Already in 1939, they had murdered 6000 intellectuals, professors, magistrates, lawyers, physicians, and clergymen. (40-41)

Czeslawa's memories often circle around her two regrets. Tuck sets up the inescapable irony that during her time at Auschwitz, this young girl holds herself to such high standards of morality that the lie she told her friend and her lack of affection for their family dog, torture her.

The novella begins with an epigraph by one of my favorite poets:

We look at the world once in childhood.

The rest is memory.

Louise Glück, "Nostos"

"Nostos" can be found in Meadowlands, a book that is also a weave of voices. Nostos is Greek for homecoming, and in Glück's collection, Odysseus dreaming about his return home is one of the strands in Glück's weave. But in the context of a short novel about people who will never return home, memory takes on a different aspect. It is sustaining, of course, but what I realized towards the end of this sad and beautiful short novel: it can also be cruel.

Tuck, Lily. The Rest is Memory. New York: Liveright, 2025.

Filed under: Understanding the effects of using white space and the present tense