The Things We Cannot Say Read online

  The lightness of the bundle she was wrapped in seemed impossible—I pulled the blanket back a little, just to reassure myself that there was a whole baby inside.

  She was so small—too small, but Tomasz had been right. The child was perfect and precious, and well worth every single risk he’d ever taken to help this family.

  “What is her name again?” I asked Saul and Eva.

  “She is our little Tikva,” Saul murmured. I glanced up at him, and he smiled. “Her name is the Hebrew word for hope.”

  I reached down and reached my finger over the soft skin on the baby’s face. I brushed the thin thatch of dark hair back from her forehead. I held her a little closer, a little higher in my arms. I realized in that moment that I wasn’t just holding a baby—I was holding all the hope that these two had left in the world. My eyes filled with tears, and I blinked them away rapidly. I knew I had to hold myself together. It would do this little family no good at all to have my pity.

  Tomasz peered down at the baby in my arms, and then he nudged me gently with his shoulder.

  “It will be our turn one day soon,” he whispered into my ear. The warmth of his breath against the skin of my ear gave me shivers, the good kind at last. I glanced away from the baby just for a moment, and we shared a gentle smile.

  We stayed only for five or ten minutes. Tomasz emptied the chamber pot for Saul and Eva and brought them fresh water to last them several days, then he handed over all of the food. I held the baby for almost the whole time, until she started to wriggle and grizzle and Eva said that she was probably getting hungry again.

  When I passed the little bundle back through the window, I wanted to say something—anything. I wanted to apologize and to beg their forgiveness, not for anything I’d done wrong, but for all that I hadn’t done. Through the years of the occupation, I’d allowed myself to be sheltered and I’d focused only on my own self-preservation.

  I’d felt helpless throughout the war, but that night, I realized with some shock that I had never actually been powerless. At any given time I could have taken a stand—like Tomasz, even like Filipe, or thousands of others I’d heard rumors of, but never dared to reach out a hand to help. I didn’t yet understand the horrific depths of the evil of the Nazi agenda—but somehow in the moonlight that night, I felt the loss of humanity, a very pause in the heartbeat of our shared existence on this planet.

  That baby should have been fat and her cheeks should have been pink and she should have been living in a house, not a mouse hole, and as I handed her back to her mother in that hidden room, I was ashamed of my cowardice, as if it was the very thing that put her there. Had I done something, anything, would the flap of that butterfly wing have changed some small branch of the path that led to that family being trapped within that wall?

  “We really need to get back,” Tomasz said apologetically.

  “It was so nice to meet you,” Saul said, his tone so warm, it made my heart hurt.

  “And thank you again,” Eva added sincerely.

  I couldn’t speak, I could only force a smile to my face and a nod, but as Tomasz and I walked away from the house, I started to cry. Tomasz took my hand and he held it tightly as we walked, but he didn’t stop until we were in the field near my house. He looked down at me, and he sighed helplessly.

  “Alina...”

  “It’s not right.”

  “I know. All we can do is try to help them. We can’t change the war, and we certainly can’t change the world. But we can do this little bit for them—help them to hide, bring them food, be their friends. It is so much more than some of our countrymen are doing. You should be proud of that.”

  “But the baby...” I whispered thickly, and another sob burst from my lips. “Tomasz, the baby is trapped in there with them, and they are sitting ducks... All the Nazis have to do is hear her cry—”

  “We have to believe that there is hope,” Tomasz said flatly. “They have made it this far, against so many odds. That counts for something, my love. In fact...perhaps in times like these, it counts as everything.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Alina

  “Tomasz. Tell me about this photographer friend.”

  It was very late, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing that baby’s thin face every time I closed my eyes. Tomasz yawned loudly, then cleared his throat. His voice was rough with sleep when he said, “His name is Henry Adamcwiz. He’s an American.”

  “American?” I repeated. “What is he doing here?”

  “His parents are Polish, but they emigrated to America and he was born there. He works for a big newspaper in America and now he is covering the occupation. He told me his home is in Florida,” Tomasz said. “It’s tropical there—there’s almost no winter. And from his house, you can walk to the beach. Can you imagine it?”

  I closed my eyes and let myself dream for a minute. I’d never been to the beach, but I had some idea what it looked like. I imagined sand and water and warmth, and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “If he can help us, we will have to smuggle some photographs?”

  “Film. It’s not developed.”

  “What are the photographs of?”

  “Last time it was photos of the camps, some photos of Jews in ghettos, even a photo of me on your hill, believe it or not. He took one when he came to visit with me and asked me to do the courier run.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  “I’m sure I looked devastatingly handsome.”

  I laughed softly.

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “Henry told me last time that he is forever looking for couriers, and he thought I was resourceful enough that I would make a good one. Last time he was quite desperate—I am just hoping that is still the case. You do happen to be engaged to a brilliant medical student who excelled at his plaster cast studies. I told him I’d plaster the film onto my arm to keep it safe, and he was excited by that idea.”

  “That’s...”

  “Genius?” Tomasz proposed. I could hear the grin in his voice, but I only sighed.

  “Tell me honestly, Tomasz. How risky is this?”

  “Well, the greatest risk at this point is that Henry doesn’t need us or doesn’t have a route out of the country.”

  “The last time, when you decided not to go, what was the plan then?”

  “Nadia told me that they put the man who went in my place into the back of a supplies truck to smuggle him close to the front, then he went on foot. She knows he made it into Soviet territory, but I don’t know if the film made it to its destination.”

  I’d heard plenty of stories about the Soviets over the years—they had occupied half of Poland at one stage, while the Nazis occupied the other half. The stories that had come across from the Soviet-held territory were no less horrific than those on our side. If that was our plan too, I suspected we were about to jump from the frying pan into the fire, and the fragile hope that had budded in my chest started to fade.

  “And you decided not to go because of me?”

  “I thought perhaps I could talk Henry into letting you come with me...but...” He sighed, brushing his hand up and down my arm. “Well, I would have appeared at your window out of the blue one night and told you I was a wanted man, then asked you to run away with me from relative safety, into extreme danger. It didn’t seem fair, and I thought if you had any sense you’d have said no anyway.”

  “I probably would have,” I admit. “But not because I didn’t want to be with you, just that Mama and Father were relying on me then...” Just the thought of Mama and Father and my throat started to tighten up again. “I can’t think about this anymore,” I whispered, holding him a little closer. “Tell me a story. Tell me about us.” Then, because I knew he’d love it, I added, “Tell me about us living in America like Henry. Near the beach, where there is no winter.”

 
“Okay.” He smiled, then he laughed softly. “We’ll get ourselves a big house in Florida. We’ll have a car, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I’ll be a pediatrician. And do you want a job?”

  “Why yes, thank you,” I said, then I pondered this for a moment before I decided, “I think I’ll work in a library.”

  “And our children? What are their names?”

  “Hmm. Perhaps our son can be Aleksy, after your father.”

  “A lovely choice,” Tomasz whispered, then he kissed my hair.

  “But can we call our daughter Julita? After your Mama?”

  “Should we not honor your parents too?”

  “Oh, there will be more children, remember? At least three more. We can honor them later.”

  He laughed softly, and that was how we talked ourselves around from pessimism and fear to a strange kind of happiness that buoyed our spirits. I had been so determined earlier that night to cast off my childish thinking, but a few hours of daydreaming with Tomasz, and I gave myself wholly into the fantasy of a happy ending for us. Even after all I’d seen, when I was with him, I could still believe that life might be a fairy tale.

  We slept then, and the next day, we woke in the darkness to endless hours of privacy and peacefulness while we waited for Henry. There seemed nothing left to do but to enjoy those precious hours, and to enjoy each other in all of the ways that we’d never had the time or privacy to really enjoy. We gorged on intimacy in the same way that we gorged on food, sharing a blissful honeymoon of sorts, as if the war wasn’t carrying on above us, as if we really were going to live out that happy ending.

  And in those too-brief days in the cellar I had once been so terrified of, I proved to myself once and for all—happiness really could be found anywhere, just as long as Tomasz was with me.

  CHAPTER 28

  Alice

  Zofia is much younger than I imagined. She greets me warmly in her lightly accented English, then leads the way to a restaurant so we can get some breakfast. The enthusiastic waitress greets Zofia by name and leads us to a table, then disappears inside to fetch us some coffees.

  “What do you recommend eating here?” I ask Zofia. She grins at me.

  “That depends how brave you are. Because what I honestly recommend is the smalec on fresh rye bread, but I’m not sure whether your American palate will appreciate it. It’s basically pork lard. Seasoned, of course. Quite delicious.”

  I imagine eating thick, gelatinous lard and can’t hold back a grimace, but Zofia laughs and suggests, “I’ll order a serving—you can taste mine.” She reaches to the little stand where a cash register is currently unattended, and helps herself to two menus. She passes both to me, but points to the top one. “In the meantime, perhaps you can have something from this menu—it’s American breakfast food.”

  I settle for bacon and eggs, and while we’re waiting for the food, Zofia suggests, “Let’s plan this trip to Trzebinia,” she says. “It is a very small place but we don’t actually know what we want to find out, right?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Well, I did some homework yesterday afternoon with the details you emailed me,” Zofia says, and she withdraws from her bag an iPad. She slips it onto the table between us and loads an ancestry mapping application. “Something a lot of tourists who visit here don’t realize is that very few of our birth, death and marriage records are digitized or even centralized. I drove up to Trzebinia yesterday afternoon as soon as I got your email, just so I could sort through the records at the municipal council. Some people really like to do it themselves, but you just don’t have the time. I did take scans of the relevant records so you’re not missing out on anything.”

  “I don’t mind,” I assure her. “But I’m curious...what kinds of things were you looking for?”

  “I mostly wanted to see if I could figure out who they all were,” Zofia says quietly. “The good news is, I managed to identify a few of them. Emilia was your grandfather’s younger sister. His parents were Julita and Aleksy Slaski. Now, I couldn’t find a death record for Emilia or Aleksy, but Julita died in childbirth with Emilia.”

  A few presses on the screen later, Zofia shows me a scanned page of Polish words that are initially meaningless to me—until Pa’s name jumps out at me.

  Tomasz Slaski, 1920.

  “His birth record,” Zofia tells me, and I take the iPad and stare down at the page. She reaches across and flips it again to show me a scan of a similarly handwritten page. “And this was one of the other names, Alina Dziak. She was born a few years after your grandfather. Your grandmother also gave you the name Truda Rabinek—well, it turns out that was Alina’s older sister. She married Mateusz Rabinek in the early 1930s. I couldn’t find death records for Truda, Alina or Mateusz.”

  “Does that mean they are still alive?”

  “Alina would be in her nineties, Truda and Mateusz well over one hundred, so it’s unlikely. I did check the phone book just in case, but no luck there. Unfortunately, in this case, a missing death record is not a reliable indicator that they are alive. Our records from the war era are patchy at best. The Nazis kept meticulous records within the concentration camps, but many of those were destroyed during the liberation, and deaths in the community were haphazardly recorded around here.”

  “So these people—Alina and her sister—were they related to Babcia?”

  “I have no idea,” Zofia tells me. “I couldn’t find a record of your grandmother anywhere.”

  “Oh...” I say, frowning. “She definitely was born here.”

  “Well, that’s actually pretty unlikely, given there’s no birth or baptism record for her,” Zofia says. She’s apologetic, but there’s also finality in her tone, and I’m still pondering this when she says, “Now, this other family she mentioned—”

  “No, wait,” I interrupt her. “Babcia was definitely born here. We don’t know much about her life, but I know for sure that she was born and lived in Trzebinia. Her whole family did—she had siblings too, and they were all born in the house they lived in until the war.”

  Zofia’s immaculate eyebrows draw in, then up.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Alice,” she says, with a careful little shrug. “There’s no records for her. In fact I couldn’t find any record of the Wis´niewski family locally. My best guess is that she was born elsewhere and moved here as a child, that would probably explain it. The same goes for Saul, Eva and Tikva Weiss. Do you know anything about them at all?”

  I’m still thinking about Babcia, because I know so little about her life before she moved, but one thing she has been clear on is that her whole world was Trzebinia before she emigrated, and I distinctly remember her telling me she’d been born in the house she grew up in. I force myself to refocus on Zofia.

  “No, I’d never heard those names before.”

  “Eva is reasonably popular with Christians and Jews here in Poland, but particularly in that era the name ‘Saul’ was popular in Jewish families, and Tikva is definitely a Jewish name... I mean, it’s a Hebrew word. There was no listing for these people anywhere, either, so I tried to search the Jewish records for births and marriages and deaths in the town. Unfortunately, I found no reference to any of them, so that likely means they were also not locals.”

  “Disappointing,” I murmur. “Is there anywhere else we can check?”

  “Unless you know of another locality, then no. I hope the fates of these people is not what Hanna sent you here to discover, because if it is...well, there might not be a way, especially in this short time frame.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I say slowly. “She just seems more interested in Pa, to be honest—as little sense as that makes. It was Pa she’s been asking about since we realized she could communicate with us with the iPad.”

  “What I found most inter
esting about the list your grandmother gave you was not that Tomasz was listed there—but the Polish words around his name.” She runs the tip of her finger along the words Prosze˛ zrozum. Tomasz. “This translates loosely to please understand Tomasz. Any idea what that might mean?”

  “I don’t know... I mean, how am I supposed to understand a man she lived with for well over seventy years—a man who’s now dead?”

  “This letter you sent was also interesting. He starts with something about them sitting together while she’s reading, but she’s laughing at him for questioning that he would make it to where she is. Then he tells her that the war has been chaotic...and life is somewhat risky so he wants her to know his feelings.” She looks up and laughs softly. “Your grandfather was a romantic, it seems.”

  “It seems,” I say, then I frown a little, because until Pa was really sick, I can barely remember seeing them so much as touch one another. “Although, that did seem to wear off a little in his old age.”

  “Many decades of marriage have that effect on a man,” Zofia laughs. Then she says, “Now some of these words are illegible, but I think the basic gist is that his love for her was the great driving force in his life—and that he would always find his way back to her if they were separated because they were made for each other. I can’t see who it’s addressed to because the first few lines are too faint, but given your grandfather wrote it and your grandmother has possession of it, I don’t think that’s much of a mystery. But these last few lines... I have to guess a little because there are words missing here and there, but I think he is saying they were together when he wrote it. Then he talks about a potential separation, and now she’s asking us to understand Tomasz... I wonder if perhaps they had lost each other for a period during the war, and she now wants to know what he got up to while they were apart?”