The Things We Cannot Say

The second night hiding in the cellar, Tomasz asks Alina to accompany him to visit Saul and Eva and their child, the Jewish family he is helping who are hiding in a neighboring farmhouse. She is impressed by the Weiss family. Despite their circumstances, they are kind and welcoming and thank Alina for the food. When Alina holds their baby, “perfect and precious” (252), Alina sees the baby is malnourished and begins to tear up. She decides she will no longer pretend to be powerless, that she must take a stand against the “evil of the Nazi agenda” (254). She sees that she has been a coward, waiting helplessly for the war to end. The only hope is action, even the smallest resistance. “We have to believe that there is hope” (254), Tomasz tells her.

That night in the cellar, the two make fierce and abandoned love, “sharing a blissful honeymoon of sorts, as if the war wasn’t carrying on above” them (258). The next morning, Tomasz outlines a bold plan. Henry Adamcwiz, a Warsaw photographer, has a small canister of film he shot of conditions in the Nazi death camps, evidence that, if given to the Allies, will create urgency in the campaign to stop Hitler.