Alina Dziak

Quick Facts

• Role: Historical protagonist; matriarch whose secrets shape the present-day plot
• Setting/Timeline: Trzebinia, Poland; German occupation during World War II
• First Appearance: On the Dziak family farm, a sheltered fifteen-year-old engaged to Tomasz Slaski
• Family: Parents Faustina and Bartuk Dziak; later the grandmother at the heart of the family mystery
• Key Relationships: Fiancé Tomasz Slaski; his younger sister; Saul Weiss, a Jewish doctor she escorts to safety

Who They Are

At heart, Alina is a protector whose love becomes a moral compass. She begins small in stature and scope—her world is the farm, her parents, and Tomasz—but the war forces her to grow into a woman who makes unthinkable choices for others’ survival. Decades later, her silence about those choices embodies the novel’s meditation on Communication and Silence, while the secret love and sacrifices she carried forward knit the generations together, underscoring Family Legacy and Intergenerational Connection.

Personality & Traits

Alina’s defining movement is from softness to steel. Her innocence doesn’t vanish so much as it hardens into purpose: love sharpens into duty; fear turns into action.

• Naive and Sheltered (at first): On the eve of war, she thinks more about wedding linens than soldiers. Her parents’ efforts to keep her “like a child” delay, but cannot prevent, her confrontation with brutality.
• Loyal and Devoted: Her love for Tomasz is unwavering and expansive; it immediately extends to his sister, Emilia Slaski, whom she vows to protect after the family is shattered.
• Brave and Resilient: She confronts a Nazi soldier to shield Emilia, sneaks through patrolled woods to meet Tomasz, and ultimately hazards escape routes few adults would dare. Each risk is chosen—not stumbled into—marking deliberate courage.
• Resourceful Under Pressure: She invents a daily “prayer” routine to slip away for clandestine meetings, smuggles food from meager rations, and adapts to shifting dangers without losing sight of her goals.
• Outward Fragility vs. Inner Strength: Described early as “fine-boned and only just five feet tall,” with “thick, chestnut hair” and “wide blue eyes,” she’s perceived as delicate—attention that later endangers her. War renders her “skin and bones,” yet the thinner her body grows, the more unbreakable her resolve becomes.

Character Journey

Alina starts as a farm girl in love, her future mapped by a proposal on a hill overlooking Trzebinia. The occupation tears that map to pieces. The public execution of Tomasz’s father, Aleksy, shatters her innocence and thrusts her into responsibility: she becomes Emilia’s protector and the moral center of a makeshift family. Reunited with Tomasz in the woods, she learns he is aiding Jewish families and working with the resistance; love draws her into danger, but conscience keeps her there. As the net tightens, she chooses action over safety again and again. Her climactic decision—to leave Tomasz and shepherd Saul Weiss to safety—crystallizes her evolution: the teenage fiancée becomes a woman defined by Love, Sacrifice, and Loyalty. The silence that follows in peacetime is not denial but a survivor’s calculus about what can be spoken and what must be borne.

Key Relationships

• Tomasz Slaski: Tomasz is Alina’s anchor and horizon. Their vow to “always find our way back” steadies her through starvation, terror, and separation, but it also pushes her toward bold, dangerous choices in support of his resistance work. Their love story is less escape than obligation: loving Tomasz means loving the world he risks himself to save.
• Emilia Slaski: After Aleksy’s murder, Alina steps into a sister’s role, standing between Emilia and occupying soldiers and making practical, daily sacrifices to keep her fed and hidden. Their bond proves that Alina’s love is not only romantic; it is protective, maternal, and fiercely communal.
• Saul Weiss: Charged by Tomasz to keep Saul alive, Alina builds a platonic partnership rooted in trust and shared terror. Hiding in trucks and bargaining with strangers, they become each other’s proof that goodness can survive inside history’s worst corridors.
• Faustina and Bartuk Dziak: Initially overprotective, her parents help create Alina’s early naiveté. War recalibrates the family dynamic: they come to recognize her resolve and, in their own ways, support her dangerous commitments, revealing a household that grows more honest—and braver—under pressure.
• Alice Michaels: Though separated by decades, Alina’s silence scripts Alice’s present. The clues Alina leaves behind become an invitation to witness, allowing Alice to finish the conversation Alina could not begin.

Defining Moments

Alina’s life turns on promises—some whispered on hillsides, others made at gunpoint. Each choice moves her from romance to responsibility.

• The Proposal on the Hill: Tomasz’s promise of a shared future becomes Alina’s North Star during the occupation. Why it matters: Hope isn’t naïveté for Alina—it’s a discipline that keeps her moving forward when everything else collapses.
• Witnessing Aleksy’s Execution: The public killing of Tomasz’s father tears away her last illusions about safety. Why it matters: It catalyzes her protective role over Emilia and sets her on a path where inaction is itself a moral failure.
• Reuniting with Tomasz in the Woods: Joy meets realism as she learns of his resistance work and the mortal risks involved. Why it matters: This encounter shifts her from passive sufferer to active conspirator; love and ethics become the same choice.
• Confronting a Nazi Soldier: When she interposes herself to protect Emilia, her physical smallness clashes with unmistakable courage. Why it matters: It marks the moment her body stops dictating her limits.
• Escape from Poland with Saul: Smuggled in the back of a truck, Alina chooses to leave Tomasz behind to save a life. Why it matters: This is her ultimate act of love and moral clarity, shaping the rest of her life and echoing through the family’s story, as detailed in the Full Book Summary.

Essential Quotes

You and I were made for each other—so whether you come to be with me or I come home to be with you—we will always find our way back to one another. This is just a little pause now, but you’ll see. Time apart will change nothing. —Tomasz to Alina

This vow frames the entire historical plot: separation is the condition of their love, not its refutation. It also licenses Alina’s most dangerous choices, transforming private devotion into a sustaining ethic.

"He is gone, but you, my darling girl, you are still here," I interrupted her. "But you mustn’t be afraid, Emilia. Because I am going to find a way to keep you safe until Tomasz returns."

Alina’s voice shifts from lover to guardian in a breath. The promise to protect Emilia reveals how her love enlarges outward—she inherits Tomasz’s people and makes their safety her own mission.

I was the luckiest girl in Poland—the luckiest girl on Earth, to find such a wonderful man and to have him love me back just as deeply as I loved him.

Calling herself “lucky” amid terror is not denial; it’s a strategy. By naming love as fortune, Alina reframes survival as a gift to be honored, not just endured.

"You are all of those things, Alina Dziak, and more," Tomasz said fiercely. "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."

Tomasz’s language mirrors Alina’s inner transformation: he recognizes a forcefulness she is only beginning to claim. His faith in her becomes a self-fulfilling engine of courage.

I’m near to that final breath now, locked helplessly here within my own thoughts—which is why it’s utterly shocking that all I really feel in these hours is an astounding peace... I am at peace, because I know that my Tomasz is waiting for me on the other side. Soon, I will breathe my last and prove him right for all time. We would always find our way back to one another. Always.

Alina’s final reflection retrofits a lifetime of silence with meaning. Peace comes not from forgetting trauma but from fulfilling the promise that shaped her choices; the love that demanded sacrifice also delivers her home.