A multigenerational cast anchors Kelly Rimmer’s The Things We Cannot Say, moving between Nazi-occupied Poland and contemporary America. The characters’ lives intersect through love, loss, and long-guarded secrets, revealing how choices made in wartime echo through a family decades later. As past silences finally break, hidden identities and sacrifices reshape what the living think they know about themselves.
Main Characters
Alina Dziak
Alina is the heart of the historical timeline, introduced as a sheltered village girl whose world is upended by the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her steadfast love for Tomasz anchors her as she evolves from innocence into a courageous survivor, ultimately emigrating to America under the name Hanna Wis´niewski and becoming Babcia to her descendants. Through tragedy, she assumes protective roles—caring for Tomasz’s sister Emilia and later forging a life-defining, platonic partnership with Saul—while the losses of her parents and brothers mark her with grief. Her life in the United States is built on unspoken truths, yet her final wish to rest in Poland speaks to a loyalty that transcends time and identity.
Alice Michaels
Alice leads the contemporary narrative as a devoted mother navigating the challenges of caring for her nonverbal, autistic son, Eddie, while her marriage frays under strain. When Babcia suffers a stroke and urgently tries to communicate, Alice’s search for answers draws her to Poland, where uncovering Alina’s hidden past becomes a mirror for her own transformation. As she pieces together the family’s true history, she reevaluates her marriage, advocates even more intentionally for Eddie, and begins to heal a long-fraught relationship with her mother, Julita. By the end, she understands her inheritance—not just of pain and silence, but of strength, love, and voice.
Supporting Characters
Tomasz Slaski
Tomasz is Alina’s charismatic fiancé, a medical student whose integrity is tested when war forces impossible choices. Coerced into the Wehrmacht, he deserts to aid the resistance and Jewish families, forming a transformative bond with Saul that culminates in the ultimate sacrifice—giving Saul his identity and route to freedom. His courage and storytelling spirit live on through those he saves and the family who cherishes his memory.
Eddie Michaels
Eddie is Alice’s nonverbal son, whose reliance on routine and sensory predictability contrasts with his profound empathy and perceptiveness. His AAC device becomes the conduit for Babcia’s final message, symbolically bridging past and present while reshaping how his family understands communication. As his father learns to meet him on his terms, Eddie becomes the quiet center of connection in the modern timeline.
Saul Weiss
Saul is a Jewish surgeon from Warsaw whose life is shattered by the loss of his wife and child, then remade through Tomasz’s selflessness and Alina’s companionship. Assuming Tomasz’s identity, he rebuilds in America as a pediatric surgeon devoted to healing, becoming a loving husband, father, and grandfather. His resilience honors the friend who saved him, while his bond with Alina grounds the family’s new beginning.
Emilia Slaski
Emilia, Tomasz’s younger sister, is carried through the war by the protection of Alina’s family after her father’s execution. As an adult in Poland, she becomes the guardian of Tomasz’s memory, preserving the truth that helps Alice unlock the past. Her life embodies both wartime innocence and the sustaining power of found family.
Julita Slaski-Davis
Julita—Alina’s daughter and Alice’s mother—is a driven judge whose pragmatism masks emotional distance, particularly from Alice. The revelations about her parents’ identities and sacrifices force her to confront the costs of secrecy and ambition. Through reckoning with her family’s history, she recalibrates her expectations and begins to reconnect across generations.
Minor Characters
- Wade Michaels: Alice’s brilliant but emotionally withdrawn husband, whose struggle to connect with Eddie becomes a turning point when he learns to communicate on Eddie’s terms.
- Pascale “Callie” Michaels: Alice and Wade’s sharp, precocious daughter, who often feels overshadowed by Eddie’s needs yet fiercely supports her mother.
- Faustina and Bartuk Dziak: Alina’s hardworking parents, taken to Auschwitz, whose loss cements Alina’s resolve and deepens the novel’s portrait of wartime devastation.
- Filipe and Stanislaw Dziak: Alina’s twin brothers, seized for forced labor and lost to the war, representing the family’s irrevocable fracture.
- Truda and Mateusz Rabinek: Alina’s sister and brother-in-law, who adopt Emilia and model the sustaining power of love and refuge.
- Aleksy Slaski: Tomasz and Emilia’s father, a respected doctor executed early by the Nazis, whose death catalyzes the children’s divergent paths.
- Eva and Tikva Weiss: Saul’s wife and infant daughter, murdered after their hiding place is discovered, whose absence haunts Saul and underscores the stakes of Tomasz’s sacrifice.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
Alina and Tomasz are the novel’s gravitational center in the Polish timeline: childhood sweethearts whose love endures occupation, coercion, and separation. Tomasz’s friendship with Saul becomes a lifeline that redefines both men—linking Alina to Saul in a bond forged by grief, gratitude, and duty. Emilia, protected by Truda and Mateusz, stands as living proof of the community that arises when blood ties fail and chosen family steps in.
In America, the legacies of those wartime choices reverberate through Alina’s new identity with Saul and the daughter they raise, Julita, whose severity reflects both ambition and the habits of silence learned at home. Alice, caught between Julita’s expectations and the relentless logistics of Eddie’s care, becomes the catalyst who finally untangles the past; by honoring Babcia’s unvoiced wishes, she learns to advocate for herself as fiercely as she does for her son.
These interlocking relationships form three primary groupings:
- The Dziaks and Slaskis of wartime Poland, bound by love, resistance, and loss.
- The Weiss connection, in which Saul’s survival threads Tomasz’s sacrifice into Alina’s future.
- The American branch—Julita, Alice, Eddie, and Callie—where inherited silence gives way to truth, acceptance, and a redefined sense of family.