The Things We Cannot Say(130)

The shudder ripples down along my body again, and then as surely as if her arms have closed around me, I feel Babcia with us in that clearing, and I feel her peace and her love and her gratitude. I close my eyes and I breathe it in, and for the very last time, I whisper, “Goodbye, Babcia.”

Eddie stands and he walks across the clearing to slip his hand into mine. I glance down at him through my tears and find he’s patiently staring up at me.

Emilia and our distant cousins will be waiting for us back in Krakow, and then over the next two weeks, Wade and Callie and Eddie and I are going to explore this country together. It’s not easy for us to be here, so far out of our routine, out of our comfort zone—but we’re making it work for every single one of us, because it’s important, and because this was always the dream. There will be challenges, there will be disappointments, there will be failures and arguments and mishaps, but that’s not preventing us from trying anymore.

Our family life is never going to be easy, but that can’t stop any one of us from reaching for our dreams. It cost our ancestors too damned much for us to have this life—the best thing we can do to honor them is to live it to its fullest.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincerest thanks to my aunt, Lola Beavis, who traveled with me to Poland to help with translation and to patiently assist with my research for this book. Thanks to Barbore Misztiel for her hospitality and, in particular, for taking me to visit my grandmother’s childhood home. Thank you to Renata Kopczewska for guide services and research assistance, and to Katarzyna M. for Polish grammar/translation advice.

I’m forever indebted to Ashleigh Finch, who offered invaluable expertise and insight into autism spectrum disorder while I was planning this book. I only hope I’ve written Eddie and his family in a way that does justice to her generosity and courage in sharing her knowledge and experiences.

And finally, thanks to the staff at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the Warsaw Uprising Museum and the incredible POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. They are unique heroes—storytellers tasked with keeping alive the memory of what should never be forgotten.



AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most of my books have started as a whisper of an idea that I have to strain to listen for. In the case of this story, the idea floated past me at my mother’s family Christmas party one December a decade or so ago.

I was standing in a crowd of cousins and uncles and aunts, gorging myself on traditional Polish food, as is our tradition at that party each year. It suddenly struck me that our now-large family had once been just a single Polish Catholic couple—my maternal grandparents. Displaced by war, they made a home almost ten thousand miles from the world they’d always known, in a country that was often less than welcoming to refugees. But seventy years later, more than fifty of their direct descendants know only that new country as home. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our grandparents’ decisions made in wartime changed our lives.

I knew enough about my grandparents’ story and the war to surmise that the paths that led them across the world to a new life would not have been easy...although I knew very little of the specifics of that journey. My grandparents both died in the 1980s, and the sad reality is that much of their story died with them. Like many of their generation, they had little time to reflect or grieve even once the war ended. Their focus was on the future, and the physical, emotional and psychological wounds of war were soon trapped beneath the surface of the new life they were forging. The lessons they learned along the way were often lost to time.

I started reading about life for Polish citizens under the Nazi occupation, initially just trying to imagine what my grandparents might have seen and experienced. But as I read about World War II, I was inspired by so many stories of love and survival, even in the face of unimaginable oppression and cruelty. Tomasz’s, Alina’s and Saul’s story became clear in my mind as I marveled at the way that not even the worst of humanity is powerful enough to stamp out grace or hope or love. I decided that to write this book, I’d need to visit Poland to deepen my research, and while I was there, I’d try to discover some pieces from my own family history.

In 2017, my wonderful aunt Lola and I traveled to Poland and spent several weeks exploring and researching. During those weeks, I discovered that inverse to the story I’d long planned for Alina and her brothers, my own grandmother had been taken for forced labor, while her brother was chosen to remain to work the family farm. And just as I’d planned for Alice, I stood on the patch of land that my grandmother’s family had farmed for generations before the war, and I peered through the dusty window of the house that had been my grandmother’s whole world before Nazi hatred changed her life forever. My aunt and I walked the streets of Trzebinia, where my grandfather was born (image 2), and ate with distant cousins (image 1).

When the time came to use my research to finally write the story, I took my own experiences in Poland and funneled them into this work of fiction. For me, the best fiction always contains threads of the personal. I used my grandmother’s family farm as inspiration for Alina’s (images 3 and 4). That real-life property is located some distance to the northeast of Trzebinia. I have taken liberties with the location and imagined it much closer to the township, because I so wanted to tell the story of that town. It suffered almost every brutal injustice imaginable during wartime—heavy bombing raids, horrific persecution, the eventual genocide of the local Jewish community, oppression of the Catholic community and executions of civic leaders. Real-life Trzebinia is located just nineteen kilometers from the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau.