The Things We Cannot Say

“Need help. Find Tomasz. […] Babcia fire Tomasz.”

This desperate communication from Babcia to Alice through the laptop language app reveals a critical theme about the interdependence of families and how family members need each other. The cryptic message using the app’s limited icon dictionary puzzles Alice. Her mission to Poland will ultimately reveal that Babcia is begging for her ashes to be buried with the man she loves.

“I stared into the dispersing crowd as I learned for the first time the way it felt to force someone else’s welfare to a higher priority than your own instinct for survival.”

Alina has no experience to understand the brutal reality of the Nazi occupation. She has just witnessed the execution of Tomasz’s father, the town’s most respected doctor, as a show of force. Alina, to this point preoccupied with Tomasz’s departure for Warsaw, here understands she must now put the needs of her parents and the farm ahead of that. This realization marks her first step into adulthood.

“Life doesn’t work that way, Alina. Hatred spreads—it doesn’t burn out with time. Someone needs to stand up and stop it. You watch, sister—when they’re done with the Jews, it will be our turn.”

Alina, protected for her childhood within the loving environment of her family farm, struggles to understand hate even as a concept. Here her mother warns her that no one is safe once hatred begins to spread. They are not safe just because they are not Jewish. Hate expands and grows to envelope everything. It is a terrifying message for a girl just discovering the power of love.

“I do so love and admire my mother, but I’ve spent a lifetime coming second to her work, and I was determined that I would never let my children feel like an afterthought.”

Early on Alice believes her highest calling is to sacrifice her entire self for the welfare of her children. Her mother, who pursued a career in law and rose to circuit judge, taught her that family first means to minimize personal growth and marginalize the integrity of her own person. This passage measures how far Alice needs to evolve from this either/or perception.

“I had no power to change my lot. All I had was the breath in my lungs and a tiny fragment of hope that if I kept moving forward, I could survive until someone else changed my world.”

Alina struggles to come to terms with the implications of the Nazi occupation and particularly how it has left her feeling helpless. Her brothers gone, her lover gone, left now to work the farm with her parents, she tries to make sense of a life she did not anticipate a scant three months earlier. If the novel tracks her coming of age into the figure of an empowered woman, then this bleak assessment marks her lowest point.

“I was furious with God that he had let these things happen to my country, and during the day I’d promise myself that I would never pray again. […] I didn’t want to be a person of faith anymore […] I wanted nothing to do with [God].”

God seems strangely absent in occupied Poland. Alina cannot understand how God could have allowed both her brothers to die in Nazi work camps. Her decision to abandon the comforting lies of religion marks her turn away from the illusions of faith and toward accepting the world as it is yet still refusing to surrender to despair.

“There was plenty to cry about in those days—but from where I found myself that night, things instantly looked much brighter […] I cupped his scruff-covered cheeks in my hands, and I brought his face hard against mine so that I could kiss him. Oh, it was heaven to be with him again.”

The unexpected reunion between Alina and Tomasz, who is on the run and in hiding, reintroduces the power and magic of their love. Unlike their earlier moments together before Tomasz departed for Warsaw, the two lovers turn to love as a desperate reassurance that the hell they are living in cannot be absolute. Events have tested the two, and their love has remained constant, a kind of heaven-enough.

“The world seemed utterly perfect in that moment—the morning light peeking through the canopy overhead, the smell of dew on the ground, the birds in the distance, and best of all Tomasz’s arms around my waist.”

The love that sustains Tomasz and Alina renders the war-torn horrors of occupied Poland into something that seems drawn from a fairy tale. Love provides them a respite, though the time they spend together leaves them vulnerable (Alina has lied to her family about where she is going and Tomasz is on the run from Nazi arrest). This moment cannot last, but because it cannot last it means everything to Alina.

“They are both our hope and our future as a nation and as a species and that is all that should matter.”

The novel refuses to allow despair to be the final word. Tomasz contemplates the simple, uncomplicated beauty of Saul Weiss’s newborn baby. All children, he believes, represent the only genuine hope for humanity. He struggles to understand why the Nazis demonize this baby because she was born to Jewish parents. Ultimately, Saul Weiss himself will dedicate his life to helping children as a pediatric surgeon.

“We have tried so hard to keep you all safe. We have done everything we could to protect you. But that wasn’t nearly enough, and now I am sorry we didn’t find some way to resist.”

The novel investigates the nature of parental love, whether it is the duty of parents to protect their children from the difficult realities of the world, to nurture them in a protected environment of love and stability for as long as possible. Alina’s mother recognizes what Alice will learn in Trzebinia: the danger of such overreach. In trying to shield Alina, they have neglected to take a stand against the evil that has since grown stronger and more resilient.

“We’re a long way from that place these days, but for a moment, it actually feels nice to remember that’s the kind of people we used to be together—almost like we’ve taken a brief vacation back to a special place we used to visit.”

The story of Alice Michaels is about the reanimation of Alice’s heart, her redemption from a quietly indifferent marriage to a man whom she once loved grandly and completely. Their love has cooled into the routine of maintaining a household complicated by the difficult challenge of Eddie. Here, a simple conversation between the two without dramatics, anger, or accusations marks their first step back to love, not as a vacation respite but as an ongoing sustaining dynamic.

“I have everything I ever wanted in life. You. This house. My job. This family…for the most part. But every day it feels like you slip a little farther away from me and you’re the key to it all.”

Wade understands the distance in their nearness to each other, how despite sharing a home and having meals together, they are drifting from each other. There is no emotional crisis, no infidelity, no financial dilemma, no health issues; nothing has damaged the marriage except the marriage itself. That Wade sees this reality indicates to Alice the promise of renewing their love.

“This is college all over again. Alice has an impulse, so Alice goes right ahead and acts on it. Feel like rebelling? Ignore a decade of planning and working toward law school and study journalism instead. Feeling randy? Get yourself knocked up by your TA.”

Alice struggles with the sense that her identity as a mother and a wife has greatly disappointed her career-driven mother. She has never told her mother that her first pregnancy was actually planned. Alice wanted to bail on her education to avoid becoming like her mother. That disappointment is never far below the surface. This is Alice’s mother’s initial reaction to Alice’s decision to head alone to Poland, a country she has never visited and whose language she does not know, on a mission with no clear agenda.

“I can breathe again. I know it’s going to be hard to get onto that plane. I can’t even imagine how I’m going to sleep tonight, knowing that I am so far from home, knowing that I am on my own.”

At the airport, alone for the first time in years, Alice is delighted and excited to find that she is not giving in to her fears. Alice’s language here draws on the claustrophobia that afflicted her grandmother. She has been liberated from the enclosure of a family she does not think can function without her direction. As she boards the plane, Alice reclaims her freedom and her identity.

“I was ashamed of my cowardice, as if it was the very thing that put her there. Had I done something, anything, would the flap of that butterfly wing have changed some small branch of the path that led to that family being trapped within that wall?”

Alina, mesmerized by the fragile beauty of Tikva Weiss, whose name is Hebrew for hope, understands that she has worked too hard at avoiding confronting evil. Drawing on the familiar metaphor of chaos theory (if a butterfly flaps a wing in Central Park, it causes a hurricane in South America), Alina ponders whether the Weiss family would be hiding in the farmhouse down the road if she had done some little thing, some little act of bravery.

“If Wade could just take Eddie to work with him, on the very rare occasion when I’m sick or can’t juggle Eddie and Callie’s schedules. My whole life would change.”

Alice begins to hope that her marriage and family might indeed undergo significant and vital change. She sees the implications of that change. Her whole life would change. Her trip away from home has altered the dynamics of the family: Wade has stepped up and become more involved with Eddie, Callie has shared responsibilities with her father, and Eddie has felt a wider emotional support beyond his mother. What Alice wonders foretells what happens when she returns.

“You are the fire that keeps my heart beating and the fuel that has powered my dreams even through this war. You are my everything. I trust you better than anyone else, and that’s the very reason I am trusting you and pleading with you to lead this man to safety.”

The novel argues the tender love between Tomasz and Alina is not enough. Love must be bigger than two people. Tomasz repurposes that love into Alina accepting the mission to get Dr. Weiss to safety and the film canister to the British. That commitment demands the ultimate sacrifice for both lovers. They will never see each other after this moment when Alina, finding courage she did not know she had, accepts the mission and says goodbye to Tomasz.

“She has two parents, Wade.”

This, in essence, represents what Alice must accept, although here she is reprimanding Wade and reminding him with a snarky, judgmental attitude that she cannot raise the kids alone. Ironically, Alice, who has protected herself from herself for years as a smothering mother, needs to hear exactly the same message—and she will in her final phone call with her family, when she sees that the kitchen is clean, the kids are happy, and Eddie is playing chess with Wade.

“To most of the people trapped within that train carriage full of sickness and death and stench, the moment surely would have been a low point in their lives—but to me, I felt like I’d stumbled upon the very beginning of the future I dreamed about.”

Alina, and Alice for that matter, comes to understand the power of the mind and the heart to make circumstances into heaven or hell. Neither woman can surrender to the world the way it is; both believe that the world (and life itself) is what a person can muster the emotional courage to make it. In the crowded cattle car, Alina revels, giddy because she has just come from that journey in a produce crate and is now on her way to freedom.

“This moment is an investment in myself. I’m giving myself permission to make a memory that benefits no one but me […] I am simply Alice, and for one breathtaking moment, I’m completely present.”

This moment, atop the mountain ridge outside Trzebinia, stuns Alice with the sudden embrace of the possibility, the energy, and the power within herself. Compelled by the sublime openness of the world that stretches beneath her feet, Alice understands that embracing herself is not a gesture of empty vanity or indifference to her family. She can be herself and a supportive mother and loving wife, all at once.

“This, my friend, is how we find the best in humanity during times when the worst of humanity may seem to have the upper hand. You are not alone—you won’t be not for a single moment.”

Saul Weiss, the bereaved husband and father, offers the novel’s hopeful theme about the power of sacrifice. War, he tells Alina, destroys our humanity. People only want to survive. Helping others becomes a weakness. Rise above that instinct—as Tomasz does in switching identity papers, and Alina does in sacrificing her mother’s ring, and Saul does in agreeing to raise Tomasz’s child as his own—and humanity will be restored.

“I have a great love just like Babcia’s great love—and this man is it. It’s not clean and simple, because our lives are not clean and simple […] But for right now—just for a moment […] my love for Wade surges until it’s all I can think about right now.”

In the closing pages, when Babcia learns that Alice succeeded in her mission, Alice sees that the love that sustained Tomasz and Alina is a version of the love she feels for Wade. Love—that is, commitment despite circumstances, stability despite a world in constant puzzling flux, and consolation when the world wounds—is not some fairy tale for her grandmother. It is as immediate and as real as Wade himself.

“And we were happy, and the life we built never stopped astounding me. I reveled in providing my daughter a life where she never had to learn what hunger or oppression meant.”

In committing to a marriage built on deception, Alina justifies that commitment by insisting that her marriage to Saul was a way to provide her daughter with the stable and loving environment Alina was denied. She does not apologize for the deception, for never revealing to her daughter the truth about her biological father. The platonic love and deep friendship that characterizes her relationship with Saul—what she calls their “very different kind of love”(405)—is a sufficient gift to Tomasz’s daughter.