At a Glance
- Genre: Historical fiction; dual timeline
- Setting: WWII-era rural Poland (Trzebinia) and contemporary Florida/Poland
- Perspective: Alternating past and present narrators; intimate, character-driven storytelling
- Core Conflicts: Survival under occupation; identity and reinvention; intergenerational secrets; the language of love beyond words
Opening Hook
A grandmother loses her words, and a family history finally speaks. When cryptic messages begin to pulse through a child’s tablet, a door opens into a past thick with danger and devotion. In occupied Poland, a teenage girl learns that love, to endure, must be brave enough to vanish and be born again. Across oceans and time, a granddaughter follows the thread, discovering that the names on a marriage certificate can be armor—and a promise kept can outlive the body.
Plot Overview
Alice’s Journey (Present Day) In Florida, Alice Michaels is stretched thin, caring for her nonverbal, autistic son, Eddie Michaels, while negotiating a marriage and a demanding extended family. When her ninety-five-year-old grandmother, Babcia, suffers a stroke, spoken language disappears—but not intention. Babcia starts communicating through Eddie’s speech app, urgently pressing Alice to find a man named Tomasz Slaski and a hidden box. Alice’s practical mother, Julita Slaski-Davis, dismisses it as confusion, but Alice senses a breach in their family story that only she can repair.
Reluctantly, she flies to Poland, leaving her family routine—the rituals, the alarms, the therapies—for an unraveling of secrets. In archives, in graveyards, and through guides who know the way memory is kept in towns, she discovers that Babcia’s name was a mask. Her grandmother is not Hanna but Alina Dziak, and the gentle grandfather who raised Alice’s mother was not Tomasz at all, but Saul Weiss, a Jewish doctor who survived by taking another man’s identity.
Alina’s Story (World War II) The past opens on a wedding in the Prologue, then rewinds to Trzebinia, 1939. Fifteen-year-old Alina is engaged to childhood sweetheart Tomasz, dreaming small, safe dreams—until the Nazis arrive. Early chapters chart the tightening vise of occupation and terror (Chapter 1-5 Summary): curfews, rations, the execution of Tomasz’s father, the sudden gulf between who your neighbors were and who they must now become.
Alina loses her twin brothers to forced labor. She protects Tomasz’s younger sister, Emilia Slaski, even as their world narrows into hiding places and whispered plans. Tomasz returns from Warsaw, transformed—a resistance courier, a liar to survive, a boy learning the costs of courage. Alina shelters him in a secret cellar beneath her family’s farmhouse, stepping fully into danger beside him (Chapter 16-20 Summary).
When Alina’s parents are deported to Auschwitz and the Gestapo begin hunting Tomasz, love demands the most impossible exchange. To save lives, Tomasz insists Alina flee with Saul Weiss and his infant daughter. Saul becomes Tomasz; Alina becomes Hanna. Tomasz turns himself in to divert the search, ensuring their escape at the price of his own life. His final message to Alina is simple and inexhaustible: go, live, remember (Chapter 31-35 Summary).
Convergence and Resolution Alice’s search uncovers the architecture of this sacrifice. She finds Emilia, now elderly, who confirms what Tomasz did and what it cost. Saul and Alina—living as Tomasz and Hanna—built a life in America that honored the man who made it possible, their marriage a shelter stitched from grief, gratitude, and steadfast care.
After Babcia’s peaceful death, Alice fulfills her last request: she returns to Poland with her family to bury Babcia’s and Saul’s ashes at Tomasz’s grave, on the hill where young lovers once planned a future. In the Epilogue, the act closes the circle—past pain acknowledged, present fractures mended—as Alice’s own family learns to speak to one another across their differences and needs.
Central Characters
Alina Dziak (Hanna)
- A sheltered village girl remade by war into a strategist, protector, and survivor.
- Her defining choice—exchanging her identity to carry a child and a history to safety—reframes love as action. Alina’s resilience turns silence (names changed, truths buried) into a living memorial to Tomasz.
Alice Michaels
- An overwhelmed mother whose days are measured in therapies, routines, and guilt.
- The investigation forces her to translate new kinds of language: the gestures of her son, the blinking insistence of her grandmother’s app, the clues in old records. Through the search, she reclaims agency, reconnects with her husband, and redraws “family” as an evolving practice of care.
Tomasz Slaski
- A beloved son who grows into resistance, then offers the highest sacrifice.
- Tomasz’s choice anchors the novel’s moral core: his life becomes the seed of another’s survival, turning identity into inheritance and memory into duty.
Saul Weiss (as Tomasz)
- A Jewish doctor who survives by assuming Tomasz’s name, then spends decades honoring it.
- His quiet gratitude shapes a devoted marriage and fatherhood, proving that borrowed identity can become a vessel for truth when sustained by integrity and remembrance.
Emilia Slaski
- The younger sister who endures in the shadows of loss.
- Her testimony validates the past and gifts Alice—and the reader—the blessing of knowing, at last, what happened.
Julita Slaski-Davis and Eddie Michaels
- Julita’s pragmatism once papered over painful history; Alice’s search pushes mother and daughter to confront love’s messier forms. Eddie, nonverbal yet clear, embodies the book’s conviction that communication is larger than speech and that listening can be an act of love.
“This family of mine is messy and it’s different... Our family life is never going to be easy, but that can’t stop any one of us from reaching for our dreams.” This reflection from Alice in the Epilogue captures her arc from exhaustion to hope. For more memorable lines, see our Quotes.
For a complete cast list and relationships, visit the Character Overview.
Major Themes
Explore a fuller discussion in the Theme Overview.
Communication and Silence In occupied Poland, secrecy is survival; in Florida, a child’s tablet becomes a lifeline. The novel argues that silence can wound when it hides truth, but it can also protect—and that love finds language in gestures, choices, and presence when words are impossible. Meaning lives in how we listen.
Love, Sacrifice, and Loyalty Tomasz’s decision reframes love as the willingness to be forgotten so others may live. Alina’s and Saul’s decades of fidelity honor that gift. In the present, Alice’s travel, time, and discomfort become modern forms of sacrifice, proving loyalty is renewed through action, not sentiment.
War, Trauma, and Survival Rimmer grounds the past in the mechanics of occupation—ration lines, raids, executions—while tracing trauma into the present as secrecy, anxiety, and estrangement. Survival reshapes identity: who you are becomes what you can carry, what you can protect, and what you can bear to remember.
Family Legacy and Intergenerational Connection The past is not past—it structures marriages, parenting, and self-understanding. Alice’s investigation shows how inherited silence can fracture families, and how telling the story—fully—can bind them again. Legacy here is both burden and blessing, a charge to live well in someone’s name.
Literary Significance
The Things We Cannot Say deepens contemporary WWII fiction by centering the Polish home front and the intimate heroism of ordinary people. Its dual-timeline design makes history feel present, tracing a direct line from occupied villages to modern living rooms where caregiving, marriage, and identity are negotiated daily. By spotlighting women’s choices—smuggling, sheltering, reinventing—Rimmer joins works like The Nightingale in expanding the war’s narrative beyond the battlefield. The novel’s most enduring contribution is ethical: it contends that remembering is a moral act, and that gratitude can shape a life as powerfully as grief.
Historical Context
- Nazi Occupation of Poland: Systematic oppression through rations, curfews, forced labor, and public executions is rendered with lived-in immediacy.
- Intelligenzaktion: The execution of Tomasz’s father mirrors this campaign to eliminate Polish intellectuals and leaders in 1939.
- The Holocaust in Poland: Confiscations, ghettos, deportations, and camp proximity (Auschwitz-Birkenau) form the novel’s relentless backdrop.
- Żegota: Tomasz’s resistance work echoes the real Council to Aid Jews, foregrounding organized, covert compassion under terror.
- “Area of Interest”: The displacement around Auschwitz reflects historical strategies to conceal genocide and exploit land.
Critical Reception
A USA Today bestseller, the novel earned praise for emotional depth and meticulous research, with critics lauding its seamless movement between timelines and its human-scale rendering of wartime Poland. Book clubs have embraced its probing of moral gray zones and its tender portrait of caregiving and family repair. As Pam Jenoff notes: “Fans of The Nightingale and Lilac Girls will adore The Things We Cannot Say...a poetic and unforgettable tale.”