In the literary war thriller called the Spiral Archive, memory is banned and people survive through their stories in a Nazi concentration camp.
Eighteen-year-old Lenka Weissová, a discreet librarian, keeps banned fairy tales hidden by coding them and putting them under Block 31’s beds. Assisted by Tomasz, a former code-runner who posed as a laborer, she invented a resistance grammar where spikes filled in clockwise rotate toward action, those with breaks indicate disgust and loss, the ones swirling the other way provide a path to safety for those involved. The spirals keep appearance from the guards, so children can warn each other secretly.
When the algorithms Lenka never wrote appear, encoding the logic of her messages but ending in fatal outcomes, she realizes something is wrong.
The Spiral Archive addresses ideas of resistance by focusing on words, on the principles behind storytelling in fascism and by noting that it is grammar that helps memory survive.
In the literary war thriller called the Spiral Archive, memory is banned and people survive through their stories in a Nazi concentration camp.
Eighteen-year-old Lenka Weissová, a discreet librarian, keeps banned fairy tales hidden by coding them and putting them under Block 31’s beds. Assisted by Tomasz, a former code-runner who posed as a laborer, she invented a resistance grammar where spikes filled in clockwise rotate toward action, those with breaks indicate disgust and loss, the ones swirling the other way provide a path to safety for those involved. The spirals keep appearance from the guards, so children can warn each other secretly.
When the algorithms Lenka never wrote appear, encoding the logic of her messages but ending in fatal outcomes, she realizes something is wrong.
The Spiral Archive addresses ideas of resistance by focusing on words, on the principles behind storytelling in fascism and by noting that it is grammar that helps memory survive.
Chapter 1: The Quiet Shelf
Breath, not dust, moved the pages.
Lenka Weissová crouched beneath the bunk, her fingers trembling above the loose plank where she hid the Andersen. The floor was cold, but not like snow or ice—the cold carried memory. Below her, the plank had warped slightly since the last inspection, like it too remembered being lifted one too many times.
Kraus, Krása, and Weiss had been burned or bartered for margarine. But this one she kept, not for its stories, but for its margins.
She slid it out with the precision of a surgeon and the fear of a girl who knew what happened when you touched something the camp didn’t assign to you. Her fingers had grown thinner. Better for turning pages; worse for holding on.
Overhead, Mirela shifted in sleep, three minor coughs. Lenka counted them like notes in a lullaby. She had learned to hear not just the sound, but the pattern. It was how you survived. Somewhere outside, a boot clicked on the gravel near the latrine. A guard, maybe. Or maybe not. She didn’t check. Looking could be mistaken for challenging.
Instead, she opened the book. The spine cracked softly. Not broken—just tired.
She flipped to page 11. Thumbelina, where she had last written. A firebird feather drawn in ash from a cigarette butt. It wasn’t hers. She knew her marks.
In the corner, faint and recessed like a breath held too long, a spiral. It didn’t belong. It wasn’t hers.
She froze.
Spirals were how he spoke.
She blinked, then tilted the book to catch the light bleeding through a crack in the wall. The pressure mark deepened—a tight clockwise spiral, ending with a dot.
Emergency message enclosed. Danger.
Lenka didn’t breathe.
She reached behind her scarf and retrieved the pencil stub worn down to splinters. It was a gift from Tomasz or a test—she never knew which.
“You see something?” a voice whispered from the top bunk.
Mirela. Eyes still closed, voice barely shaped. But awake. Always awake.
Lenka pressed the book against the wall to anchor it. “Go back to sleep,” she whispered.
“You found a new one.”
“I said sleep.”
Mirela didn’t push. She never did when Lenka’s voice held that note. But she was awake now, and would remember. And Lenka would have to explain something by morning.
She retraced the spiral. It was different—angular, jagged at the top loop, and broken in the pattern.
A message inside a message.
She turned the page. A fox stared out from the illustration, its tail curling into another spiral. Loose, counterclockwise. Safe to exchange. And in the margin, almost invisible:
“Foxes burn. Only the cat climbs.”
Lenka swallowed.
That was Tomasz. That was page 17 of the Grimm. That was a breadcrumb.
But why encode it here?
She flipped back to Thumbelina’s page. The paper was faintly torn at the edge, as if someone had once hidden a fragment between pages. But it was gone.
Had Tomasz come back? Had he used her book without telling her?
Or had someone else?
She was the keeper of the shelf—but not its master. And books moved when she slept.
She closed the Andersen and slid it back beneath the plank, folding the cloth over the edges. She would return later with a thread count, a mark register, and a heat match on the ink. For now, all she had was breath.
And a choice.
She turned to Mirela, now wide awake, eyes glinting in the dark.
“If I give you a story tomorrow,” Lenka whispered, “can you promise not to draw in the margins?”
Mirela nodded too quickly. “I never draw unless it’s real.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean… if it’s already there, I only trace it. That’s not the same.”
Lenka’s stomach turned. “You’ve seen spirals before?”
“On the Firebird page,” Mirela said. “Before you told me about Tomasz. Before he stopped coming.”
That page had been removed. Burned. She’d destroyed it herself after the inspection.
“Mirela,” she said slowly, “do you remember the shape?”
The girl nodded. “Double spiral. Like wings.”
Double spiral. Emergency escape protocol.
Tomasz had used that code once, when the latrine tunnel was blocked, they had to reroute through the woodpile.
“Mirela—did you draw it? The one with wings?”
She hesitated. “No. It was already there.”
Lenka stood. Too fast. Her head hit the slat above, rattling the bunk.
If the double spiral had returned, and in the Firebird… that meant Tomasz had returned too. Or someone who knew his hand.
But that was impossible.
He had vanished the night the boy disappeared.
She pressed a hand to her chest, where the smuggled ledger note still rested beneath her blouse. Spiral-burnt. Ash-marked. Her only proof.
No one else knew the complete set of spirals.
Unless Tomasz had taught them.
Unless Tomasz had betrayed them.
She moved to the corner of the shed, where the laundry sacks hung damp and dripping from the last shift. She crouched and counted them. Eleven. One more than usual.
The twelfth sack was breathing.
She didn’t cry out. She didn’t move.
Just listened.
It was too slow for a rat. Too deep for a child.
And then—cough. Three pulses. A mimic.
Mirela’s pattern. Repeated back.
Lenka didn’t hesitate.
She reached in and yanked the sack open.
Nothing.
Just damp fabric.
Except—scrawled inside, on the sack lining in black coal:
“The cat climbs.”
Tomasz.
Or someone pretending to be him.
Ash, not ink, marked the threshold.
Lenka didn’t sleep.
The sack remained open like a question no one could afford to answer. She sat with it crumpled beside her, the coal-script fading into damp. She had stared at those three words—The cat climbs—for so long her vision blurred them into claws.
The phrase wasn’t new. Page 17 of the Grimm. Tomasz’s favorite signal. It meant that the route was open, but only for one person—a solo climber. No return.
But who had left it? And why now?
At first light, she took her laundry rations to the sorting shed. The others were already there, hands red from soapless scrubbing. Mirela tagged along, her scarf slipping off her ear like a half-forgotten vow.
“Tell me,” Mirela whispered while they sorted lice-infested wool into piles. “Is Tomasz coming back?”
Lenka didn’t answer.
She knew better than to speak in a place where sound had memory. Instead, she reached into the inner seam of her apron and pressed a slip of paper into the sleeve of a soaked overcoat. A mother would find it later. A message disguised as a fairy tale cue:
Ravens wait in winter. But not all wings are for return.”
If Tomasz were truly back, he’d recognize that line. He had written it first, months ago, in invisible ink along the broken spine of The Firebird.
But this version—Lenka’s version—had no spiral. No symbol of trust. Just a memory wearing Tomasz’s voice.
She stepped outside with the pail of drained suds, carefully scanning the camp yard with only her peripheral vision. You never looked directly at the watchtower. It made you memorable.
A cough—sharp, deliberate—sounded near the latrine pit. Three pulses. The same mimic.
She turned slightly.
The Block 22 supply line was forming. A group of men stood with sacks slung over their shoulders, awaiting inspection. Most stared at the ground. One stared back.
Not directly. But deliberately.
A face half-shadowed by soot. Burn scar down the wrist. Tomasz?
He mouthed a single syllable. Not a word. A name.
“Fox.”
Lenka didn’t react. Not outside. Not while watching.
But inside her chest, something cracked because fox meant betrayal.
And it wasn’t a warning. It was an accusation.
She looked away.
Later that evening, under the echo of the laundry scaffolds, Lenka found the second message.
It was folded into the seam of her drying rag. A child’s rag. Too small to be hers.
The corner held a loose counterclockwise spiral—safe to open.
Inside: a name.
Jakub.
She dropped the cloth as if it had burned.
Jakub Hesse. The one who called himself an archivist. Who offered extra broth in exchange for secrets? Who always knew when someone new arrived, and when someone failed to wake.
Jakub had asked about the Andersen last week.
Jakub had smiled too cleanly.
And now Tomasz—if that was Tomasz—was calling her Fox.
Was this a warning? Or a test?
Lenka’s Object of Desire had shifted: she now needed to decode the source of betrayal without exposing herself—or Mirela—as compromised.
She stuffed the cloth deep into her apron and walked, brisk but silent, to the far end of the sorting yard. Past the ash pits. Past the rusted ladder that hadn’t been used in months.
The tower shadows stretched long across the gravel. Dusk wasn’t safe. Dusk was too quiet. It gave the room a chance to catch its breath.
She turned a corner—then froze.
Jakub stood in front of the supply crate. Too still. Too early.
He was tracing something in the dirt with his toe—a shape.
She couldn’t see clearly, but she knew spirals. She knew when they were wrong.
“Looking for something, Lenka?” His voice was always smooth. Like paper over glass. “Or someone?”
“I was just—”
“Collecting stories?”
She swallowed.
He moved aside, gesturing to the crate behind him. “You know, I’ve always admired your little library. So much imagination. So few pages.”
“I should go.”
But she didn’t move.
Jakub leaned forward. His breath smelled of burned bread and formaldehyde. “Let me tell you a story,” he said softly. “Once upon a time, a girl thought the world could be rewritten in the margins. But she forgot—someone else was editing.”
Lenka’s fingers twitched for her pencil stub.
Not to write. To mark. To warn.
He smiled.
“I’ve seen the Andersen. Page eleven has a smudge now. Did you notice? Like someone leaned in too close. Like someone else read it.”
“I—”
He waved a hand. “Don’t worry. I’m not accusing. I’m merely documenting. Archivists notice patterns. Yours, for instance… lean left when nervous. You blink rapidly when lying.”
“I’m not—”
“Don’t finish the sentence. It’ll only make you interesting.”
He turned and walked away, leaving boot prints shaped like ellipses in the ash.
Lenka remained. Breathing. Not thinking.
Then she turned to the crate.
Inside—books. Charred, warped, wet. The latest shipment. She lifted one. It crumbled.
But tucked in the bottom, beneath a mold-blackened binding of The Fox and the Cat, was a cloth scrap.
She opened it.
Inside: a single page from Andersen’s The Snow Queen.
Reversed.
Folded backwards.
And in the bottom corner: a double spiral.
Emergency.
Mirela had been right.
The firebird was back.
And someone else—someone new—was drawing spirals.
Lenka returned to Block 31 by roll call. But her thoughts weren’t in line. They were back in the margins. The spirals. The accusations. The fact that Tomasz had called her Fox.
Or whoever had used his face.
She passed Mirela a scrap of paper beneath the blankets. The girl’s eyes widened.
“What’s this?”
“Tomorrow,” Lenka whispered, “we draw a new tale.”
“But which one?”
She leaned in, voice low as ash.
“The one where the fox steals fire.”
Breath, not fire, moved between them. But it left a mark just the same.
Lenka sat cross-legged in the laundry sorting shed, the cold floor biting through her skirt. A single candle stub guttered between rusted buckets. It wasn’t hers—she hadn’t seen wax in weeks. Tomasz had brought it.
Smuggled it inside a hollow spool of thread, alongside a folded page from Andersen’s Tales—The Snow Queen, but reversed. She turned it over now, fingertips twitching at the edges.
The margins had changed.
Not ink. Not charcoal. Just faint pressure spirals—wounds in the page, invisible unless caught in sideways flame. Tomasz called it reading in the ashlight—a way of seeing not what was written, but what had been pressed into forgetting.
He crouched across from her, his elbows on his knees, his coat pulled tight. Still silent. He always was. But tonight, he held her gaze.
Lenka tapped the page. “You folded this backwards.”
A slow nod. He reached into his jacket and produced a pencil stub, worn down to splintered wood, and offered it without a word.
She took it. She always did.
“What am I supposed to write?” she whispered.
He touched the margin of the paper, where a faint double spiral had been notched, and erased it. This left only residue, as if the warning had been withdrawn or overwritten.
“Was it you?” she asked.
His brow furrowed.
“The Firebird page. The child who vanished. Was it your hand?”
He didn’t answer.
She looked down at the pencil, then back to the page.
“Someone’s drawing your spirals,” she said. “And not to warn. To bait. Jakub knows. He quoted you. He mimicked the spiral.”
Still, Tomasz said nothing.
She hated his silence. Hated how it felt like betrayal wrapped in caution. How it mimicked trust without offering proof.
“You called me Fox,” she said flatly. “Yesterday. In the yard.”
He looked up sharply. Then shook his head.
Not me.
Or not now?
She didn’t know. Couldn’t.
“Then who is using your code?” she demanded. “Who sent the sack message? Who gave the girl the Firebird page?”
He reached forward and, for the first time, took her wrist. His fingers were colder than the floor.
He pointed to a phrase etched faintly in the margin of the reversed fairy tale.
Lenka tilted the page again.
“Some birds fly backward to survive the wind.”
She blinked.
“Is that you?” she asked. “Flying backward?”
Tomasz released her wrist. He pulled a fragment of cloth from his coat—a hem torn from a child’s blanket, frayed and ash-stained.
She recognized the stitching.
It was Mirela’s.
She snatched it from his hand. “Why do you have this?”
He didn’t flinch. Just pointed again.
The fabric had something stitched faintly in thread the color of soot.
A spiral.
But not his.
It was coarser. Uneven. And wrong.
Broken midway through the loop.
Split spiral. Signal for betrayal.
Lenka dropped the cloth.
“No,” she whispered. “She wouldn’t—she wouldn’t know how to draw that.”
He finally spoke.
“Children copy what they think is safe.”
His voice was raw. Throat-thick. Like it hadn’t been used in days.
Lenka staggered to her feet. The candle flickered. The room shrank.
“She copied you,” she said. “She trusted you. I trusted you.”
He didn’t rise. Only looked up at her like something crumbling.
“I told you once,” he rasped. “Not all stories end in fire.”
“And some do,” she snapped. “You just choose which ones.”
She stormed to the doorway—then froze.
Outside, the moon was half-eaten by clouds. But near the latrine pit, a figure knelt.
Jakub.
Drawing something in the ash with a stick.
Lenka strained to see. The spiral was giant. Crude. Etched into gravel like a sigil.
A second figure approached.
A child.
Not Mirela.
Another.
Jakub handed the child a folded book.
Lenka didn’t wait. She darted back inside and blew out the candle, plunging the shed into darkness.
Tomasz was already standing.
“We have to stop him,” she said. “Now. Before he makes the children part of it.”
He didn’t move.
“I said now.”
“No,” he said.
Silence fell between them like a dropped match.
She stared. “Why?”
“Because if we act now,” he said, “they’ll find you.”
His voice wasn’t angry. Just factual.
She stepped forward, trembling. “Then let them.”
He took her hand. Not gently. Not sweetly. Tactically.
“I can burn a page,” he said. “Make it look like the child tampered. Jakub will get his warning.”
“No more lies,” she said.
“Not lies,” he said. “Stories. Stories are what they fear.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the broken stub of a spiral-marked pencil. Not hers. Not his. Smaller.
Child-sized.
“They’re learning,” he said softly. “Faster than we can stop them.”
Lenka looked down at the scrap of blanket. At the faint, uneven spiral.
Mirela had drawn it or copied it.
But someone else had taught her how.
Not just Tomasz. Not just Jakub.
Someone else was writing in their margins.
“Then what do we do?” she asked.
Tomasz turned back toward the table. Picked up the reversed Snow Queen.
He folded it again.
Different this time.
Not backwards. Not coded.
Just broken.
“The next time they read this,” he said, “they’ll know it’s a trap.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then we burn the shelf,” he said.
“No,” she said. “We don’t burn anything.”
She took the book, tucked it under her arm, and turned to leave.
His voice followed her like a closing gate.
“Then make sure it’s the right story, Lenka.”
She didn’t look back.
She returned to Block 31 and found Mirela awake.
The girl sat cross-legged in the bunk, sketching in soot with a matchstick on torn linen.
“What are you drawing?” Lenka asked.
Mirela looked up, eyes wide.
“A fox,” she said. “But he’s stealing light, not fire.”
Lenka knelt beside her. Watched the little spiral tail curl behind the fox in the drawing.
“How does it end?”
Mirela shrugged. “He hides it in a cave. But the light’s alive. It whispers. It tells the girl where to find it.”
“And what’s the girl’s name?”
Mirela paused.
Then smiled faintly. “She doesn’t have one yet. She only gets a name if she finds the spiral.”
Lenka took the cloth. Stared at the spiral tail.
It wasn’t wrong.
It wasn’t right either.
It was becoming something else.
Something no longer hers.
In the dark, she reached for her pencil stub. Not to write.
To erase.
It's difficult for me to know where to start with a review of this book as it was, for me, an entirely unique experience and one that I'll probably never have again. I don't want that to be interpreted as unenjoyable but it has left me scratching my head a little and ruminating on its content, its themes and its characters.
The opening action of the book takes us right into what is at its heart: there are texts which tell stories and which need to be preserved/conserved somehow because of their importance to the people of the place in which they're found. These are recognisable as fairytales from Andersen and Grimm to name two. Someone, however, is working to counteract what the stories contain or propose for their own narrative purpose. This is not just about the words on the page but is concerned with spirals which are particular marks made by individuals, which can lead the meaning or interpretation, and skew the purpose, of the text on which they're placed. They are also code used by those reading and sharing these manuscripts for messages to be communicated.
If that sounds mysterious, that's because it is at this stage and only by degrees is your understanding of the importance of these spirals revealed as your reading of the book progresses.
The main characters of the book are Lenka, Tomasz and, in part, Mirela. And this is where it gets difficult for me to expand on exactly what is going on in the book as it's never explicitly explained. Again, this isn't a criticism as I think that it's part of its charm, this being led by Hendrik but not really clear where, as it works with the idea of the spirals and what they represent, so it feels like you're in a spiral dialogue yourself almost, like the text you're reading is a reflection of the meaning of the text you're reading, if that makes sense.
It's a very tricky book to review because it has merit but it also has mystery and at times, I felt like its depth was unfathomable to me, like it was working on another philosophical level. That being said, it has tension, from its setting and the hopes of its characters, and it's well-written with purpose, and dialogue which sculpts the characters into individuals who, as a reader, you want to see thrive.