‘The Rest is Memory’ by Lily Tuck (2025) – 116 pages
In ‘The Rest is Memory’, author Lily Tuck focuses on an aspect of the Holocaust that hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should, the German Nazi murder of Catholics in Poland during World War II. It is estimated that the Germans killed between 1.8 and 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II.
In October 1940, Poland was divided between Russia and Germany.
“The concept of Poland, Hitler announced, would be erased from the human mind.”
Hitler in a speech said, “our strength lies in our speed and our brutality…Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans.”
The novella ‘The Rest is Memory’ focuses on just one of the victims, a fourteen year-old girl named Czeslawa Kwoka who was murdered by the German Nazis in Auschwitz.
One of the other prisoners at Auschwitz was ordered to take pictures of the other inmates. He took more than 40,000 photographs of the men, women, and children interned at Auschwitz. One of the pictures he took was of 14 year-old Czeslawa Kwoka which is on the cover of ‘The Rest is Memory’.
“She loves to play jacks and she is good at it. She can pick up all ten jacks at once. The trick is to throw the ball up high to have enough time.”
Before Czeslawa and her mother were arrested, Czeslawa’s father and other men from the village have already been rounded up and shot and buried by German soldiers in Roztocze Forest.
When they arrive at Auschwitz, one of the first things the guards do is chop off all of their hair.
“My hair was blond,” Czeslawa tells Krystyna. “A golden blond, my mother called it. It came down nearly to my waist.”
The behavior of the guards at Auschwitz goes beyond just bad into the sadistic and sick. Primo Levi described the Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoss as “a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel, who sometimes blatantly lies”.
There is no doubt how ‘The Rest is Memory’ will end.
“Curiously, on March 12, 1943, the day Czeslawa is put to death, just as it had on the day she arrived on December 13, 1942, it begins to snow at Auschwitz.”
And now, in 2025, we have a new wave of fascism sweeping across the world. Considering what happened in Poland over eighty years ago, the Catholic Church and all Catholic church members should be in the forefront of the fight against this new wave of fascism.
Grade: A
Tony's Book World 
Posted by Lisa Hill on February 21, 2025 at 4:26 AM
Yes…
I never imagined this might happen in my lifetime.
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Posted by Anokatony on February 21, 2025 at 5:58 AM
Hi Lisa,
I too never expected fascism to rear its ugly head again. I think one of the problems is that very few who actually remember the terrible events of World War II are still alive.
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Posted by Lisa Hill on February 21, 2025 at 6:41 AM
And yet everywhere I look there are readers gushing about books and movies set in WW2… maybe I’m in a parallel universe.
Seriously, I think it may have something to do with the teaching of history. When I was at Teachers College in the 1970s, we were apprised of a new way to do it, to engage students. So primary school students might have been taught about WW2 by studying the toys and games that children had then, or in secondary schools, about the home front, e.g. the clothes that women wore during rationing, or through the contributions made to the fight by minorities. (There’s a museum site in the UK, I forget which one, which featured the one dark-skinned firefighter in the service and had nothing to say about teenagers like my father.) Teaching about the causes and repercussions of the war was swamped by this process of ‘bringing a microcosm of the experience’ to the students so any intellectual rigour was lost.
But also, gosh, I’m still absorbing the idea that Americans voted for a president with character traits that are widely known worldwide and yet dismissed by the US electorate. They don’t even know their recent history, or if they do, they think it doesn’t matter. I hope we don’t see the same thing happen here in our forthcoming election, but we might, and for the same reason: the incumbent is such a disappointment that people think that anybody else might be better.
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Posted by Anokatony on February 21, 2025 at 7:00 AM
Yes, it took a high amount of ignorance, dishonesty, and cruelty by the people of the United States to elect our current President. I try not to use the word America or Americans when talking about the United States because there are still some countries in the Americas that are well run and have good governments.
The whole world saw the United States headed for this Trump train wreck and there was no way to stop it.
I came across this quote recently that I like:
“In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.” ― George Carlin
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Posted by Lisa Hill on February 21, 2025 at 7:13 AM
I take your point about Americans v US and I will try to remember for the future … but they’re not exactly united either, are they?
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Posted by Anokatony on February 21, 2025 at 8:34 AM
No, we did have one major Civil War, North vs. South, and it is bad leaders like our current one who cause them.
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Posted by Lisa Hill on February 21, 2025 at 9:03 AM
No, I didn’t mean that. I meant the political rivalry. As I understand it, despite all the hoopla of elections, Americans have always accepted the winner as their president, whichever side won. But that didn’t happen last time, and there seemed to be genuine fears about what might happen if Harris had won.
But, you know, I’m just observing from afar, and our news services are so bad these days, that they could be exaggerating.
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Posted by Anokatony on February 21, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Hi Lisa,
I think there are a lot of similarities between United States and Australian politics. There are the reasonable forces, which are occasionally less than the best, and then there are the loud-mouthed troglodytes that want to destroy everything. I will always go with the less-than-the-best reasonable forces.
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