The Things We Cannot Say

In these chapters, both Alina and Alice move at last to independence. Through the difficult therapy of awareness, in which both characters are rocked emotionally by a perception they had never before understood, the women assert the strength of their character. They realize that they can withstand such awareness and in turn act in ways that they previously thought would be pointless. Whether Alice Michaels struggling to find her voice in the chaos of a dysfunctional family, or Alina Dziak emerging from the womb-like cellar, ready to assert her place now that she realizes the stakes of the Polish resistance, the two women share the same insight. Helplessness, as it turns out, is the not the same as powerlessness. Alina reflects, “I’d felt helpless throughout the war, but that night, I realized with some shock that I had never actually been powerless” (253). So begins Alina’s independence and anticipates Alice’s reclamation of herself.

Alina begins this section hiding, terrified and in full retreat. She is in the cellar, literally and symbolically clinging to Tomasz. She is certain that this cellar could be a refuge where she and Tomasz can ride out the war. Even though she is claustrophobic and wildly uncomfortable in the dank dark, she accepts the cellar hideout. There is plenty of food, and no one knows they are there. She has lost her family but is determined that as long as she and Tomasz survive, the war is not her concern.

Her spiritual birth begins when Tomasz invites her to visit the Jewish family he has been helping. That move, a symbolic emergence from the womb-like protection of the cellar, marks Alina’s movement toward awareness and her determination to assert herself. Jews are an abstract quantity for the Catholic Alina. She understands the Nazis have turned their virulent hate against the Jews and that the brutal occupation of Trzebinia is largely an expression of that hate. She had never met a Jew until she meets the Weiss family. She is stunned by a revelation that should have occurred to her long before: Jews are people, just like Catholics. The Weiss family, who live in a tiny walled-off room at the mercy of one of Alina’s neighbors who is interested only in gold, impress Aline with their grace, composure, and generosity of spirit. Cradling their newborn daughter (Tikva, whose name means “hope” in Hebrew), Alina is moved to tears, not just because the baby is beautiful but also because Alina can feel how little the infant weighs and understands she has been born into a world where she is expected to starve to death. This is Alina’s tipping point. She thinks, “Whatever we had done, it wasn’t enough. Not for these people—who immediately struck me as kind and cordial, despite the desperate circumstances they found themselves in. I was embarrassed in that moment that I hadn’t found a way to do more” (251).

The Alina who agrees to the dangerous (and longshot) plan to get to the Polish army in Soviet territory is not the fluff-headed romantic schoolgirl from earlier chapters. The sobering encounter with the baby convinces her that she is no child; she is helpless, certainly, against the horrors of the Nazi occupation and the pogrom against the Jews, but she is far from powerless. In these chapters, Alina acts, really for the first time, motivated not by her own agenda but rather by the urgent need to help others, to think beyond her own private concern.

To borrow from the chapters’ symbolism, she cannot stay in the cellar-womb. It is time for her to be born, as is suggested when Alina accepts the identity papers of someone named Hanna Wisniewski. When she agrees to help Tomasz, in fact, she kicks away the last support she has relied upon—she will act without Tomasz’s help. The wide-eyed romantic who just months earlier could not conceive of a future without Tomasz now understands the fear and exhilaration of independence. Likewise, Tomasz swaps identity papers with Saul Weiss, hoping to save his family from Nazi interception after the Weiss family’s execution. Alina sees the reality: “I had to walk away from him—and if that wasn’t already an impossible task, then, I had to continue his work in helping Saul escape and guarantee the delivery of the film” (319). As she steps into the produce crate, the novel suggests that it is a kind of grave (in fact, Saul compares the tiny space to his family’s grave) from which Alina will rise. Her interment brings with it the tantalizing promise of resurrection.

Under different circumstances, Alice Michaels arrives at a similar moment of anticipation. She taps into an energy she did not know she possessed after so much time spent interred within the claustrophobic confines of her family. As with Alina, awareness is the catalyst for Alice’s bold movement into independence and self-possession. In this case, much as Alina’s emotional life relied on the support and love of Tomasz, Alice’s only emotional support has been Babcia, whom she knows as Hanna Slaski. That familiarity has been nursed through a childhood of time shared with Babcia. Alice’s love for her grandmother is her sole authentic emotional relationship. It is a measure of that emotional bond that Alice agrees to fly to Poland on a mission that is at best ambiguous, at worst a waste of time and money. As Zofia, her Polish guide, tries to understand, “we don’t actually know what we want to find out, right?” (259).

Alice goes to Poland for answers, but the more she tries to get to the bottom of Babcia’s cryptic messages, the more she senses a mystery that she cannot contain, control, direct, or even solve. The more data Zofia shares from her investigation into Trzebinia’s municipal records, the less Alice understands. Much like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass stories, this Alice wanders in a wonderland without logic, clarity, and certainty. Nothing makes sense. Names do not add up, dates do not work, not unless Alice is prepared to accept that everything she knows about her grandmother is wrong.

Like the moment when Alina cradles the helpless Jewish infant, this moment stuns Alice not to despair but to action. She sorts through explanations—records lost in the war, identity documents forged or traded, similar last names—but nothing leads her anywhere but to a shocking conclusion. The woman she knows as Hanna Wisneiwski never existed; rather, Alina Dziak took the name and married someone named Tomasz Slaski, who apparently was not Tomasz Slaski. Her family, her life, and her grandmother are all revealed to be a sham in a single crippling epiphany. Alice resolves to sort out the troubling and contradictory evidence. Like Alina, she rises to the challenge.

Like Alina’s movement toward independence is marked by her growing confidence in the strength of her identity, Alice prepares to move beyond the confines of her family identity. She is more than a stay-at-home mom, more than the mother of a gifted daughter, more than the principal caregiver of son with special needs, more than the wife of a busy researcher. As the week progresses, Alice searches for evidence that the house, without her there, is coming apart at every nail. She wonders whether she can be anything but “the domestic kingpin of the family […] the family’s chief operations officer” (307). It is the role she is comfortable playing. Their dependence makes any movement toward her independence virtually impossible. Locked in that emotional prison house, like the cellar and then later the produce crate in which Alina hides, Alice is grateful when Wade assures her that he now knows the dimension of her dedication to the family. However, it is not enough for Alice, who questions, “Why haven’t I demanded an equal partner in the parenting that needs to be done?” (307). Like Alina, Alice is now poised for genuine movement into independence.