The Rest Is Memory: A Novel
“Cold, hungry, sick with typhus, and limping from the dog bite on her leg, Czeslawa has forgotten most things. Only in her dreams does Czeslawa remember:
“Her lace communion dress, muddied on a motorcycle ride past unfamiliar dark trees,
Her father twisting the rooster’s neck and laughing,
The dead calf struggling to its feet,
Painted eggshells lying scattered on the floor and her mother weeping,
Searching all over for her missing shoe and sure to be punished,
Anton’s plane spiraling down to earth in a ball of fire and the dog barking,
Her family’s bedsheets blowing in the wind while drying on a line then turning into hanged corpses . . .”
Weaving fact and fiction together can present a difficult boundary for historical fiction authors. Breathing life into a person we know little about is not easy. It requires dogged research, the ability to use sound academic references (if possible), the talent to recreate a personality that is faithful to the real person, along with great character development, captivating dialogue, and creative drama.
One might argue that readers retain more information about history when the events arrive through memorable characters. It is a delicate balance between accepting archetypical figures derived from historical facts, and making them extraordinary through memory, relationships, and discourse.
Such is the case with, The Rest is Memory, by gifted author Lily Tuck. She chose the most egregious event in history: the Nazi Holocaust. Although there are many Jewish villages in the same part of Poland that became victims of Nazi Germany, Tuck’s focus is on a Catholic community, reminding us that while millions of Jews in Poland were murdered by Nazi Germany, so were millions of gentile Poles. She offers a different perspective on the victims. Tuck creates masterful images of her real-life teenaged protagonist, Czeslawa Kwoka, capturing the descriptions, sounds, and experiences of her life, and the imagined quality of her family interactions. She masters this with aplomb.
Czeslawa is a 14-year-old girl living in a small village in Southwest Poland called Wolka Zlojecka. After the Nazis conquer Poland in 1939, schools are closed. Czeslawa spends her days working on the family farm. Abused by her angry and sadistic father, she forms a close bond with her mother and grandmother. One day, German soldiers arrive at the farm. They take Czeslawa’s father into the woods near the farm along with a large group of Polish men from the area. Witnesses hear much shooting. No one returns.
Czeslawa and her mother are part of the forced relocation of countless innocent Polish women and children. This will enable people from Germany to take over the farms, land, and property of the displaced Poles. As terrible as this sounds, their conditions continue to disintegrate. In 1941, Germany rounds up and moves over a hundred thousand people from the region around Czeslawa’s village, which is called Zamość. This is the first region of Poland to be emptied of all people by the Nazis.
The women and children are sent by foot to a refugee camp, where they are forced into four groups: The first two are to be examined to determine if they are suitable for “Germanization”; the third group is to be sent to the Reich as slave labor; the fourth group is sent to Auschwitz. Czeslawa and her mother are selected for Auschwitz. They are forced into cattle cars on trains, without food or water.
In Auschwitz, Czeslawa’s prisoner number, 26947, is tattooed on her left arm. Her hair is shaved completely, and she is shoved into a tank of foul disinfectant. Forced to wear a striped uniform of base fabric, Czeslawa’s picture is taken from three angles by famed camp photographer Wilhelm Brasse. The author stumbles across this picture while conducting research, which feeds her imagination.
The Rest Is Memory is a relatively short novel that is packed with knowledge, memories, and hardship. And while historical fiction and memoirs do not require it, Tuck provides page references. Her depth of research and attention to detail is superb. She helps us witness the disintegration of life in Poland under Nazi rule, shining a light upon the inhumanity and brutality of Nazi Germany, as it dehumanizes, degrades, and destroys innocent lives.
The Rest Is History is much more than a factual account of real people. Tuck shows us what it must have felt like to have your life suspended; to be terrorized, brutalized, starved, enslaved, and to have your life terminated in a wicked place consumed by evil. The facts of this tragedy are woven through the lives of real people as Tuck paints a picture with words of the horror of Auschwitz. Transforming from a human girl into a Nazi number was only the beginning of Czeslawa’s three-month descent into hell.
Czeslawa leaps from the page into our hearts in part because author Tuck is very skilled at creating personality from historical remnants. She also enters our hearts because of her innocence. We are left to wonder how millions of “normal Germans” of the 20th Century could dispassionately observe their government deliver such a horrendous meltdown of morality. And how can we of the 21st century hope to prevent repetitions of such inhumanity?