What This Theme Explores
War, Trauma, and Survival in The Things We Cannot Say asks what it means to endure a war one did not choose and cannot control. The novel insists trauma is not a single blast of violence but a grinding condition—fear, deprivation, moral compromise—that reshapes identity. Survival becomes a moral project as much as a physical one: preserving dignity, love, and memory in a system built to erase them. The novel also maps how this damage resonates across decades, linking individual silence to the broader ripples traced in Family Legacy and Intergenerational Connection.
How It Develops
The arc begins in shock as Alina Dziak confronts the bombing of Trzebinia—an abrupt rupture from pastoral routine to mortal terror. The cellar scenes and shattered streets establish trauma’s first form: disbelief and panic, a desperate instinct to live another hour, captured in the chaos outlined in the Chapter 1-5 Summary.
As occupation settles, the violence becomes organized and public. The execution of Aleksy Slaski in the town square codifies a new social order governed by surveillance, scarcity, and arbitrary punishment. Here survival shifts from hiding to calculation: curfews, rationing, and the calculus of whom to risk and whom to save—each “choice” a barbed test of conscience.
Resistance grows from necessity. Families stash food and information; Tomasz Slaski works with Żegota; Alina participates in small, dangerous acts that bind private love to public defiance. Yet each act invites reprisal. Personal losses accumulate—the off-page deaths of Filipe and Stanisław, and the murder of Saul Weiss's family—teaching that survival is not triumph but statistical reprieve, shadowed by guilt.
Finally, escape redefines survival as endurance without resolution. The truck crate, the cattle car, and the refugee gauntlet to Buzuluk enact trauma’s last movement: not an ending, but a narrowing future. Even in the bleak safety of the camp recalled in the Prologue, the self must be rebuilt around absence. Alina’s later silence is thus not denial but a scar—evidence that to protect the living, some truths are buried.
Key Examples
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The bombing of Trzebinia: Huddled in the cellar, Alina’s mounting claustrophobia turns a shelter into a psychological trap. The moment translates geopolitical catastrophe into intimate terror, inaugurating trauma as a bodily state that persists beyond the raid.
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The public executions: The killing of Aleksy and the mayor in the square functions as spectacle—violence staged to reorganize power through fear. It fractures communal bonds and teaches townspeople that survival now requires strategic invisibility.
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The deaths of Filipe and Stanisław: Reported secondhand, these losses deny even the narrative comfort of last words. The impersonal delivery reflects war’s bureaucratic cruelty and the limbo of grieving without bodies or closure.
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The murder of Eva and Tikva Weiss: This atrocity crystallizes genocidal logic—the annihilation of a family as a principle. It catalyzes Tomasz’s most dangerous acts of aid and lays bare the paralysis of trauma in Saul’s aftermath.
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The journey to Buzuluk: The crate and cattle car compress space, time, and identity into mere cargo. Disease, filth, and the sight of death mark survival as an endurance test that strips away illusions yet demands moral vigilance to help others along the way.
Character Connections
Alina’s trajectory charts trauma’s evolution from shock to strategy to silence. She loses brothers, parents, home, and first love, yet persists by transforming identity—adopting “Hanna,” guarding secrets, and later withholding her story. That silence, while wounding her descendants, is also a protective architecture: a way to keep the past from devouring the present.
Tomasz embodies the moral torment of complicity and redemption. Forced service and exposure to the Warsaw Ghetto seed guilt that he answers through resistance—funneling aid, risking capture, and sacrificing himself in the end. His arc insists that survival can mean reclaiming humanity by spending one’s life for another’s.
Saul personifies the Holocaust’s targeted destruction and the slow work of living afterward. Having lost home, profession, and family, he rebuilds through medicine, transmuting grief into healing while never relinquishing memory—the tiny leather shoe as an ethical anchor to what must not be forgotten.
Alice Michaels inherits the consequences of Alina’s silence, pursuing the truth not just to solve a mystery but to repair a relational rupture. Her caregiving for Eddie mirrors Alina’s wartime vigilance: both women navigate hostile systems, improvise survival strategies, and redefine strength as daily advocacy rather than grand heroism.
Symbolic Elements
The Cellar: Shelter that becomes a prison, the cellar compresses the paradox of survival—safety that inflicts its own psychic cost. Later, as a hiding place for Tomasz, it turns concealment into quiet resistance, transforming fear into agency.
The Smoke from Auschwitz: A horizon of ash that characters cannot fully name, the smoke externalizes ambient dread and the scale of unseen atrocity. It is trauma’s weather: constant, unignorable, and largely beyond comprehension.
The Cast: Alina’s plaster cast is both encumbrance and camouflage. By smuggling film within it, she converts injury into instrument, embodying survival’s blend of pain, deception, and hope.
Mama’s Wedding Ring: A portable future that war threatens to erase, the ring represents continuity of love and home. Trading it for entry to Buzuluk enacts a hard truth: sometimes survival demands relinquishing cherished symbols to protect the life those symbols promise.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel’s civilians-first portrait of war echoes in today’s refugee crises, where ordinary people navigate borders, scarcity, and bureaucratic indifference. Its depiction of intergenerational trauma accords with contemporary psychology, showing how silence—meant to shield—can transmit harm as surely as confession can heal. In an era marked by resurgent bigotry, the quiet courage of Alina, Tomasz, and Saul foregrounds small, risky solidarities as the frontline against dehumanization, urging remembrance not as ritual but as a moral practice.
Essential Quote
I had not been comfortable with confined spaces even at the best of times, but that day I felt a depth of fear that I’d never even realized was possible. I lived my death that day, over and over and over again in my mind.
This moment distills trauma into a loop—survival as reliving one’s own imagined death to prepare for the real one. The cellar becomes an inner landscape where war colonizes the body and imagination, foreshadowing how Alina’s later silence will be both a symptom of that colonization and a means of keeping it contained.