The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo in
the hands of one of our greatest novelists.
First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this
mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a village in southeastern Poland before her
world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, tattooed number 26947 on arriving at
Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. Three months later she is dead.
How did thisthe fictionalized account of a real person who was Catholichappen? This is the question that Tuck
grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa’s story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles,
Jewish and Catholic, who perished during the German occupation. Also evoking, among others, the writer
Tadeusz Borowski’s ill-fated life and Janusz Korczak’s valorous attempts to save orphaned children, Czeslawa
becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only
recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.