The Auschwitz Memorial uses its social-media presence by highlighting the lives and fates of some of the people who went through the camp. Where available, there is a photograph, and there are a few short sentences about that person’s fate.
“15 August 1928 | A Polish girl, Czesława Kwoka, was born in Wólka Złojecka,” an entry might read, “In #Auschwitz fro [sic!] 13 December 1942 (expelled by the Germans during pacification of Zamość Region.) No. 26947 She was murdered with a phenol heart injection on 12 March 1943.” (not linking to this particular entry, given the Memorial ceased its presence on the particular social-media platform that has since turned into a haven for Nazis and other assorted far-right figures).
The photographs play a crucial role. Typically, they look like family photographs or studio portraits. For that brief moment that a viewer spends with one of these entries, the face of someone who lost their life a long time ago because of unimaginable cruelty is yanked back from the abyss of forgetting.
And there are a name and some dates. I often find myself calculating how long a person lasted at Auschwitz. The typically short duration of their stay reflects the cruelty of the fate that awaited those who had to enter that particular hell on earth.
But it’s the photographs that are crucial. Photography theorists typically evoke Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum, some subjectively felt detail in a photograph that moves or touches a viewer. Do ordinary people look at photographs that way? I’m not sure.
Either way, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to see the photographs themselves in the Auschwitz Memorial’s social-media posts as the punctum. It is their continued presence — and not some detail — that demonstrates how photography is such a powerful medium.
For some of the Auschwitz victims, there are identification photographs taken at the camp. Underneath the words describing Czesława‘s life and fate, there is such a triplet. The photographs were taken by Wilhelm Brasse, who was Polish and traced his German sounding name back to Austrian settlers.
Brasse spent four years in concentration camps, most of them in Auschwitz. He was in luck: he knew how to take photographs, and he was able to speak German. He was of use for the camp’s administrators, so they gave him a job as a photographer and better food and accommodations than the vast majority of the other inmates.
Brasse ended up taking thousands of photographs of newly arrived prisoners, some of which miraculously survived the war. Czesława‘s photographs are among them. When Brasse died in 2012, the New York Times ran an obituary. “Three of the photographs,” writes Lily Tuck in the Author’s Note of The Rest Is Memory, “were of Czesława Kwoka, a fourteen-year-old Polish Catholic girl. I cut out the photos and kept them.”
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” Theodor Adorno wrote in 1949, as if four years after the end of World War 2 the world was waiting for another grandiose pronouncement from a German. Granted, Adorno had been an émigré. Still…
But the man had a point: what role might poetry or any form of art really play after the Zivilisationsbruch that was Auschwitz and the system of extermination camps? Would art be able to deal with something like Auschwitz? If yes, what might this look or sound or feel like?
The Rest Is Memory is a relatively short book that is billed as a novel. I don’t know whether this is the best way to describe the text. Instead of a longer, detailed story, possibly laid out in chapters, this book offers short, clipped texts, some of them factual (there are footnotes). But a discussion over whether this is a novel (or what kind of novel) would unnecessarily divert attention away from Lily Tuck’s achievement.
“This is a work of fiction based on fact,” Tuck writes in her Author’s Note, “for Czesława, I imagined a pretty orange hen named Kinga, a creamy karpatka, a Bible with a white leather cover and a game of jack, Anton with the nice laugh, and snow.”
There’s something in the simultaneous sparseness and specificity of these imagined facts that manages to fill out the whole — without doing it explicitly. Too little is known of this Polish girl — other than her face and the startled and frightened look on it when faced with Brasse’s camera, about three months before she was murdered.
Larger parts of the devastation that German soldiers and civilians caused in Poland during World War 2 are still unacknowledged in contemporary Germany. In light of recent events — the country’s ruling class shamefully weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism to target dissenters (among them many Jews) — it’s not difficult to come to the conclusion that the country of my birth has learned only one thing from our shared past: how to pretend to have learned something without actually accepting any of the lessons.
There should be millions of individual books such as this one, one each for every person who lost their life in the Nazi’s death machinery. But who would find the time to write all of these, let alone read them? In any case, the presence of a single book is more searing than what millions of them could achieve, in particular since Tuck leaves so much unimagined.
It took me three days to read the 114 pages, simply because I ended up being emotionally so exhausted after spending time with the book. And of course, there’s Czesława‘s face on the cover. Maybe I am imagining this. But her eyes are directed at something above a viewer’s eye level, which makes me feel as if she is aware of something I am not.
Walter Benjamin famously wrote about Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”
But that is not what Czesława sees with her eyes. In front of her is another catastrophe (that, granted, will soon turn into Benjamin’s), the one of the brutal present, a catastrophe that in many different forms people are experiencing every day on this planet, whether in the trenches in Ukraine, the ruins of Gaza, or elsewhere.
Imagining, as Tusk has done here, can form a part of not forgetting. Imagining an unknowable detail of something much larger that must not be forgotten.
Photographs can play a huge role in this endeavor, not necessarily only as documents (such as the photographs taken inside the Auschwitz camp) but also as magical entities that can nudge us to imagine: who was that person? What might she have felt?
Because we will want to imagine. We need to look, and we need to imagine. If we can’t imagine a stranger’s cruel fate, if we cannot attempt to feel their pain — what hope is there left that we might build a better future?
Highly recommended.
Lily Tuck: The Rest Is Memory; 128 pages; Liveright; 2024