The Things We Cannot Say

Alice, a 30-something full-time mother, is a woman who has lost touch with herself in her efforts to maintain control and direction in her home. A disappointment to her mother, who imagined a career in law for her gifted daughter, and now drifting from her husband, Alice early on epitomizes how even a strong woman can be overwhelmed by the demands of a family. It is the special challenge of Eddie that began Alice’s drift from her family and from herself. After seven years of being the primary caregiver to a child on the autistic spectrum, Alice begins to assume that role encompasses all she is. If her husband Wade has a successful career as a respected researcher, and her daughter Callie is gifted far beyond the intellectual expectations of her 10 years, Eddie gives Alice her reason to function. He needs her. It is her experience helping her grandmother that reveals to Alice that a family is a dynamic, that mothering and smothering Eddie are not the same expressions of a giving heart, and that it is alright to be a bit selfish, to find time to explore her own identity.

In the last pages, Alice considers devoting time to writing a novel about her grandmother and the events at Trzebinia. That is a significant emotional turn from the woman who in the opening pages was harried and frazzled, who regularly sought the easy escape of a bottle of wine and a bubble bath when the world proved too much. Like Alina’s mission to get the film cartridge safely to the Allies, Alice’s mission to help her grandmother, involving a trip halfway around the world to an unfamiliar country and culture and overseeing the reunion in death between Babcia and Tomasz, reveals her strength of spirit and loving heart.

Everything about Tomasz Slaski seems to elevate him to near-sainthood; he is so entirely without flaws that his character appears deliberately constructed to be admired and to inspire emulation rather than sympathy. After all, he is handsome, charming, smart, wealthy, and entirely devoted to Alina, his childhood sweetheart. Despite the harrowing experiences of the Nazi occupation, his love for Alina never falters. With him, the cliches of love as eternal and love as an absolute are realities, not mere words. He is a dutiful and loving son following in his father’s heroic footsteps as a doctor, a profession that demands self-sacrifice and rewards compassion. He works with the Polish underground to secure the safety of dozens of Jewish refugees. And in the ultimate gesture of sacrifice, he gives the grieving Saul Weiss his own identity papers and returns to Trzebinia and certain death by handing himself over to the Nazis to interdict the manhunt for him, a wide dragnet that would have jeopardized the lives of his family and of Alina and compromised the delivery of the film cartridge to the Allies. Yet this exemplary character struggles with a conscience that will not be appeased. He cannot forgive himself for collaborating even briefly with the Nazi occupation army.

Like a true tragic hero, Tomasz suffers from this single action that in his mind forever compromises the moral integrity of his heart. He is aware of his moral failure, despite the obvious fact that he served in the Nazi army only because he was given no choice. He understands there must accountability. In a horrific world defined by the Nazis where morality so clearly does not operate, Tomasz acts as the novel’s moral conscience. Everything he does, every sacrifice he makes, he does so to offer penance for that single transgression.