The Things We Cannot Say(80)

“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 interesting 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?”