SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Lily Tuck saw a photo of a girl about a decade ago - 14 years old, face bruised, eyes stony, and shown in striped concentration camp garb, wearing the number with which the Nazis replaced her name. Her name is Czeslawa Kwoka. And in a new novel, Lily Tuck imagines her life and those of other Polish citizens killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp - some Catholic, like Czeslawa, and many, many Jews. Her novel, "The Rest Is Memory." And Lily Tuck, the National Book Award-winning novelist, joins us now from NPR in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
LILY TUCK: Thank you.
SIMON: How did you see this photo?
TUCK: I always read the obituaries in The New York Times - not because I'm morbid, but because I think they're, like, little history lessons. And as you mentioned, about 10 years ago, I read the obituary of someone called Wilhelm Brasse. Wilhelm Brasse was the official photographer for Auschwitz.
SIMON: He was a prisoner, too, we should explain.
TUCK: Yes, he was a prisoner, and he was Polish and half Austrian. And he ended up taking 40,000 pictures of the prisoners who came into the camp. Obviously, he survived. But included in his obituary, which I read, was these three pictures of Czeslawa Kwoka. And I was so struck by this innocent, very beautiful little face and the lost life, that I cut out the pictures and I put them in a box where I keep things that might be of interest later. When I finished my last novel, I looked through my things and found the photograph and decided that I would try and write about her.
SIMON: And what could you find out, what could be known, versus what you had to imagine for a novel?
TUCK: I found out very little about her. I had a book that was published by the Holocaust Library in Auschwitz that lists all the names of the people who ended up in Auschwitz from her area in Poland. So I knew the date of her birth and her death and her mother as well. But I knew very little about her except where she came from. Mostly what I learned was how many Poles died during World War II. And a lot of people mostly know that the Jews were exterminated and died in Poland, but they don't realize how many Poles died as well during the war.
SIMON: I'm going to ask you to read a section, and we'll caution people - it will be difficult to hear. It's when Czeslawa and her mother arrive at Auschwitz.
TUCK: Right. (Reading) On arrival at Auschwitz, Czeslawa and her mother are taken to the bathhouse, where they're made to take off their clothes and strip naked. A guard rips out the opal earrings from Katarzyna's ears, then shaves off all her body hair. It is the first time Czeslawa sees her mother naked, and she looks away. Her mother is ugly and unrecognizable. 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOOK PAGES TURNING)
SIMON: That line - that last line has been running around in my mind ever since I read the book - all she knows may be useless. That's because none of what she knows can help her survive.
TUCK: Right.
SIMON: Well, how do you narrate her story through her eyes?
TUCK: The way I would narrate whatever I'm trying to write. I mean, I - it's just paying attention to language, really, to each word, and I try to make each word significant and true to what I'm trying to say.
SIMON: Snow keeps entering the story. What does Czeslawa see in snow? She tries to gobble it, right?
TUCK: Yeah, right. Right. It starts out that every time it snows, she tilts her head back and takes the snow in her mouth - I mean, drinks the snow, and she thinks it's a drink from Heaven. When she arrives at Auschwitz, it's snowing, and she does that, and the guard sees her, and he hits her. I don't want to give away the end, but at the end, again, it snows in Auschwitz. I made this up. I don't know whether it snowed on March 13, 1943, when she died.
SIMON: There are a lot of names in this novel. You seem to feel it's important to know that although this is a novel centered on Czeslawa's story, there were many, many, many people who were executed at Auschwitz.
TUCK: Yeah, I wanted to sort of honor all those people who are completely forgotten by writing their names. And there's a list of, say, all the writers who perished in Poland during the war, and that's incredibly moving. I've never heard of most of them. I've heard of Bruno Schulz, of course. But it was a way of - as, again, sort of honoring and respecting all these people who died by saying their names.
SIMON: Lily Tuck's new novel, "The Rest Is Memory." Thank you so much for being with us.
TUCK: Thank you for inviting me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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