The Things We Cannot Say

What Babcia Whispers

Alice Michaels has always loved her grandmother Babcia but has never been able to reach her. Babcia arrived in America after the war and has never spoken of Poland, never spoken of what she left behind, never spoken of the years that made her who she is. Alice, managing a busy household with a husband and a son with autism whose needs structure every day, has not pushed.

Then Babcia has a stroke, and in the hospital she begins whispering names. Tomasz. Aleksy. Names that mean nothing to Alice’s mother or uncle. Names that suggest a life before the life anyone in the family knew about. Alice’s mother cannot travel to Poland to investigate; Alice, exhausted and overwhelmed, finds herself on a plane to Trzebinia.

Alina, 1939–1942

The novel’s historical thread follows Alina, a young Polish woman whose love for Tomasz — a local boy, her whole future — collides with the Nazi occupation of their village. Rimmer’s research into the occupation of rural Poland is thorough, and the historical sections are rendered with the specific texture that separates serious historical fiction from costume drama: the way the occupation arrives in stages, the way compliance and resistance coexist in the same person, the specific calculations made by those trying to protect children and neighbors while surviving themselves.

The relationship between Alina and Tomasz is not simply a wartime romance but a study of what two people who love each other are capable of doing under pressure that cannot be imagined in peacetime. Rimmer understands that the choices made under occupation are not heroic or cowardly in any simple sense — they are human, which is more complicated.

Alice’s Contemporary Strand

The contemporary thread earns more than it might seem to. Alice’s life — the specific difficulties of parenting a child with high needs, the particular fatigue of a marriage stretched thin by those needs, her own sense of lost selfhood — is handled with genuine insight and avoids the condescension that sometimes attaches to depictions of autism in popular fiction. Her son Eddie is a person, not a narrative device.

Her journey to Poland is partly detective work and partly the kind of confrontation with family history that changes who you are in relation to it.

The Things Left Unsaid

What gives the novel its title — and its emotional core — is the question of why Babcia never spoke. Rimmer does not allow simple answers. The silence was not only about pain or shame; it was about the impossibility of language for certain experiences, and the way love can choose silence over the burden it would impose on those who came after.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — A masterfully structured dual-timeline novel that brings Nazi-occupied Poland to life with authenticity and compassion, anchored by a contemporary story that makes the past feel immediate and urgent.