Published in 2019 to glowing reviews, The Things We Cannot Say by Australian Kelly Rimmer is a family saga that celebrates the power of unconditional love, the heroic determination of the human will to survive, and the resiliency of hope in even the darkest time. Much like Rimmer’s other novels, The Things We Cannot Say was both a New York Times and an Amazon top 10 best seller. Rimmer is also the author of The Paris Agent (2023), a historical novel inspired by female British spies in World War II.

The novel is told in a split perspective, with chapters alternating between the story of Alina Dziak and the story of Alina’s granddaughter, Alice Michaels. Alina is a Polish farm girl who falls in love with a promising young medical student just as Germany invades Poland and begins what would become five years of brutal rule. Alina’s granddaughter, Alice, is a perpetually frazzled American mother struggling to raise a son with special needs and a daughter who is gifted. Alice receives only minimal help from a husband who is distracted by the demands of his career.

Against her better judgment, Alice agrees to help her grandmother, who is in the hospital after a stroke and now approaching death. Alina asks Alice to fly to Poland to settle some complicated family business involving a secret the dying woman has kept for nearly 80 years.

This study guide uses the 2019 Graydon House paperback edition.

Plot Summary

It is 1939. Growing up on a modest family farm near the small town of Trzebinia in southern Poland, Alina Dziak always knew in her heart that she would marry Tomasz Slaski, a boy from the town who dreamed of being a doctor. Before Tomasz leaves Trzebinia to study medicine in Warsaw, he promises Alina that when he returns the two will begin their life together. Within weeks of his departure, the Nazis invade Poland. The Nazi troops stationed in Trzebinia confiscate farms and produce, impoverishing Alina’s family. Over the difficult early months of the occupation, Alina never gives up hope that Tomasz will return. When he does return, however, he tells her that when the Nazis took over Warsaw, he was conscripted to fight in the German army despite his moral objections. A Jewish doctor, Saul Weiss, and his wife Eva helped Tomasz escape Warsaw. Since then, Tomasz has helped the Weiss family (they have an infant daughter) to hide from the Nazis, knowing that harboring Jews is punishable by death.

Alina and Tomasz renew their love. Tomasz reluctantly agrees to move into Alina’s family’s cellar. Tomasz scavenges to bring food to the Weiss family, who are hiding in a nearby farmhouse. Tomasz outlines a plan to Alina to get both of them out of Nazi-occupied Poland into the safety of the Russian occupied zone. He has been given the responsibility to get a canister of film to the Allies that shows the ghastly conditions at the nearby extermination camp Auschwitz. Tomasz and his fellow resistance fighters hope the film will convince the Allies of the existence of the death camps and the urgent need to intervene.

An informant, however, tips off the Nazis. Dr. Weiss must watch as his wife and daughter are both executed by the Nazis. In a noble gesture, Tomasz agrees to switch identity papers with the grieving Weiss who, traveling now as Tomasz Slaski, will accompany Alina, who carries the film canister in a plaster cast on her arm, to freedom. Tomasz promises Alina he will find her. The trip to the Russian military camp is harrowing, but they arrive. They wait for months. Then Alina feels the first signs that she is pregnant. Fearing the stigma of an unmarried mother even in the military camp, Saul, now identified as Tomasz Slaski, marries Alina, whose forged papers identify her as Hanna Wisniewski. When British agents arrive to take the film, Saul and Alina accompany them to England. From there the two go to America. The baby, a daughter they name Julita, is born soon after that.

Saul and Alina live as Tomasz and Hanna Slaski. Their friendship is deep and abiding, although they never consummate their marriage. Saul becomes a successful doctor. The two enjoy more than 50 years together before Saul’s death. Julita grows up in a loving family, never suspecting the true identity of her father. She becomes a respected circuit judge. She marries and has a daughter, Alice, who grows up very close to her grandmother, Hanna/Alina. Alice marries Wade Michaels, an up-and-coming executive in nanotechnology who provides Alice a comfortable home. They have two children. Their daughter, Callie, is gifted and precocious, and their son, Eddie, is diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. Alice, a stay-at-home mom, struggles with the challenges of two such diverse children and feels that Wade uses work to avoid the children.

When her grandmother, who is in her 90s, has a stroke, Alice rushes to the hospital. Her grandmother, whom she affectionately calls Babcia, struggles to communicate and must use the help of one of Eddie’s voice accommodation devices. Babcia manages to convey to Alice that she wants her granddaughter to go to Poland to help untangle a family secret she has kept since World War II. Reluctantly, certain that Wade cannot handle the kids even for a week, Alice flies to Poland. There, with the help of Tomasz’s 90-something sister Emilia, Alice uncovers the identity switch. She learns that the man she knew as her loving grandfather Tomasz was in fact Saul Weiss, a Jewish refugee. More devastatingly, she learns that her biological grandfather, Alina’s true love, Tomasz, turned himself in to the Nazis to protect Alina and was executed. Before Alice returns to the States, she visits Tomasz’s modest gravesite near Alina’s farm.

Alice returns home with the bittersweet news for her grandmother. Shortly after, Babcia dies. Alice and her family, now reconnected in a renewed bond of family love, fly Saul’s and Alina’s ashes to Poland and inter them next to Tomasz’s grave.