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How Does 'The Things We Cannot Say' Explore WWII History?

2025-06-26 05:47:38

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Mila

'INTERVIEWS & DIALOGUES: THE THINGS WE CANNOT SAY' – An In-Depth Look at this WWII Novel by Author of Deep Space Thrillers Kelly Rimmer. THE THINGS WE CANNOT SAY is a compelling emotional excavation of historical events of WWII, with author Kelly Rimmer meticulously examining the ramifications on ordinary people within the fiction. Rimmer cleverly uses the war torn Poland setting, typically sidestepped for the more relatable Western Europe location of more traditional WWII novels, granting readers a riveting perspective of the chaotic Eastern Front via the protagonist Alina.

A further strength of The Things We Cannot Say is its handling of silence as historical evidence. While Alice is given a search list of various words and objects that belonged to her grandmother, she has to piece together half-remembered stories and reassemble torn documents to try to get near the truth. This is how most families uncover their war history – through silences and guesses.

Their marriage is a bit of a secret as Tomasz is also working underground to try and support the resistance. In the present day, when Alice finally works out her grandmother’s coded diary from all those years ago, it’s a powerful reminder of how history can be hiding in plain sight.

2025-06-27

Uma

Just finished The Things We Cannot Say by Amber Lapp. It’s a very powerful book in showing the perspective of WWII from a civilian standpoint. I loved how this book was written in two time frames: present day and 1940s Poland. The historical portion of the book follows the life of a young Polish girl named Alina and her quiet farm life is abruptly changed when the Nazis invade Poland. Her life is so simply portrayed by listing out the small details of her life and how they were affected by the war. She even has to carry ration cards and wonder what happened to her neighbors who disappeared overnight. The resistance is not portrayed in a glamorous light. Instead, it is portrayed as messy and desperate, like when they had to smuggle food by putting it in the bottom of a coffin. The modern day portion of the book follows Alice as she discovers her grandma’s past. It portrays how war trauma can affect people for generations in ways that we don’t even realize.

2025-06-28

Paisley

This is not a war book about battles. It is a book about women’s quiet strength and defiance in the face of war. Alina’s story takes place in Nazi-occupied Poland during WWII. Most of the action unfolds through the eyes of a kitchen window, where Alina, the heroine, bakes bread made with sawdust when there is no flour. She even uses the church’s-confessional booths to transmit resistance messages.

Alice’s modern-day story runs counter to Alina’s as she struggles to come to terms with the war long past. Much of the novel is set in the present but is thrown into relief by Alice’s growing realization of her grandmother’s story. That moment when Alice realizes that ‘Babcia’ was in fact Alina is quite breathtaking. Rimmer also cleverly uses technology to tell the story of Alice’s son with autism, who communicates with his mother via an iPad. He ‘speaks’ via the indirect means of diaries and heirlooms that Alina and Tomasz used.

It has been so carefully researched that there is a sense of history of the war, not just of the statistics of death, but of the individual humans’ experiences, as opposed to just reading about year X happened, this battle, that. The ways that the Polish girls during starvation would rub beets in their cheeks in order to appear healthy. Alina’s realization of Tomasz’s joining of the Warsaw Uprising during the war.

2025-07-01

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Related Questions

Is 'The Things We Cannot Say' based on a true story?

5 Answers2025-06-26

I wouldn't call this a true story. But it is a really true story. In the sense that there is a big difference between this being a true story and it being a historical account, and if this were a true story we’d be talking about whether or not the dates were correct and whether or not she wrote the letter on the correct date, as opposed to this being a work of fiction very heavily researched to try and get as accurate as possible an emotional and social history of that time. And I think that Rimmer does an amazing job of giving us Alina’s eyes to see her world. Those are fictional eyes but the world that she sees is not. It is an incredibly accurate portrayal of life under occupation. It is an incredibly accurate portrayal of life in the USSR. That is why this feels so true. It’s not true in the sense that Alina and Natashya are not real people.

What happens at the ending of Things We Never Say?

9 Answers2026-03-15

In terms of character development, the protagonist goes through a change as well. The silence which once was oppressive and heavy, a sort of prison made of unspoken words, is no longer a problem by the end of the book. In a quiet atmosphere while looking at old photos, the protagonist and their parent share a new sort of silence. This is no longer a silence between them, but rather a place they can both be in. The ending of the story resides in the last line of the book: “We sat together, in a silence that was no longer something between us, but a place we both inhabited.” There is a huge difference between silence and speech. The protagonist’s journey went from trying to break oppressive silence filled with unspoken words and pain to being able to shared comfortable silence with their parent while looking at old photos. The goal of the book wasn’t for the protagonist to say everything to their parent. Rather, it was to change the quality of silence that they shared together, and to make that silence a place that they both could reside in. That is a much more realistic and powerful form of healing.

How does The Things We Never Say end, and who are the key characters?

10 Answers2026-05-25

There's no one wealthy, no fairy-tale wrap-ups to their pasts. And, while the evil past is likely the greatest obstacle that the characters in this story faced, it's not necessarily defeated by the end of the novel either. Rather, the characters have come to terms with their own personal struggles within the story. Their greatest enemy was their own emotion and inner turmoil. These characters, in the end, found victory. Maggie finally allows herself to be vulnerable enough to acknowledge her son. Sarah has finally found her place and understand her family's past. These are quiet victories and not necessarily what one would expect from a book such as this, especially not from the plot. However, the ending is incredibly satisfying in terms of the realistic arcs of the characters within the novel. It's not an easy task to make these kinds of choices as a writer, but this one is a masterstroke. The ending prioritizes the true and realistic emotional journeys of the characters and eschews contrived plot structures in favor of more meaningful territory.

How does 'All the Light We Cannot See' end?

10 Answers2025-05-29

One can also see the model city, the real key to the story, as a tool that her father created in order to help her to find her way through a world she could not see. A part of it is returned to a museum – to a place of learning and seeing. It had led her to safety, and now it led Werner’s memory back to her story. A tool that has outlived its purpose. A monument. As opposed to tying up all the human threads into neat little bundles the novel lets them fade away, but the object undergoes a journey of immense elegance. The house in which she had grown up with her father is the true witness to the love of this father to his daughter, to her fear, to the kindness of the young soldier and to the reverence of later generations of travelers. We, the readers, accompany this object along its way. The characters come and go in the story of this object but it remains and in its space and materiality it holds all the moments of light.

How does 'The Things We Leave Unfinished' end?

4 Answers2025-05-29

That ending left me staring at my ceiling for 20 minutes or so. The resolution of the dual-timeline story came down to this: the historical story of lovers Noah and Scarlett finally had their fate revealed to us through a collection of long-lost letters that present-day writer Georgia discovered. Their story wasn’t a simple, tragic, and neat separation as everyone had assumed all along. Rather, it was so much more heartbreaking AND more beautiful than that. Meanwhile, the modern romance between Georgia and Jameson got wrapped up pretty quickly, but for me, the real meat of the story was with the historical Scarlett and Noah. As for the end of the modern story, it did favor emotional honesty over wrapping up the story with a bow and calling it “perfect” – which is how I’d have it, naturally. I found it rather refreshing, actually – even if it left me a little teary-eyed in some places. Some of the end scenes are quiet and simply develop as we read on. There’s no huge climax – but by that time, you’re so emotionally invested in the characters that it’s all you need. The very last scene is between Georgia and Jameson – and it has to do with accepting the truth of the past just as it was, rather than as you wished it to have been. I didn’t think the modern story resolved the romance quickly enough, but that was totally secondary to the historical part for me.

Who dies at the end of 'All the Light We Cannot See'?

7 Answers2025-05-29

Writing this book required me to kill Werner. The connection between him and Gertrude was meant to be a transient, a miracle, and if the two of them had carried on into the long, hard, dirty years of the post-war era, the connection between them would lose its purity and intensity and become just another relationship. But as it is, the relationship between them is a spark in the dark and the only way that the spark can be remembered as a spark is for it to go out. The story of the two of them would be a different one if they had carried on into old age, but instead, Doerr chose to end their time together when it was at its most intense and wonderful. It is a classic 'love story cut short by tragedy' archetype, elevated by the historical context in which the story takes place and written in exquisite prose.

Is 'When We Cease to Understand the World' based on true events?

8 Answers2025-06-30

After finishing the book I had to look up every person in the book to make sure I wasn’t mistaken about who was real and who wasn’t. The basis of the fictionalized people and stories in the book are real, but that is where the truth of the book ends. The author does a great job in portraying the lives of these very unique and talented individuals, but he does a lot of fictionalizing throughout the book. The suffering that the author describes in such gothic and almost supernatural ways is not real. The author did describe how Grothendieck, a recluse, burned many of his works, but he wasn’t being haunted by a demonic concept of mathematics. However, the way that the author describes the mathematical concept that was haunting Grothendieck is a perfect metaphor to describe how an abstract concept can be able to destroy a person who is completely consumed by it.

What books on michigan explore Native American history?

8 Answers2025-09-06

Consider utilizing children's and young adult literature as a means to introduce history to others in an accessible and thorough manner. The ‘The Birchbark House’ series by Louise Erdrich is an exquisite work of historical fiction that follows the lives of an Ojibwe family in the 1840s on the shores of Lake Superior in what is now Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Although not set in the state of Michigan proper, the culture and setting are identical to that of the Upper Peninsula. The work was meticulously researched by the author in order to clearly portray the daily lives of the main characters and the historical season of contact that the native population experienced with Europeans. It is an excellent vehicle to introduce others to this era and culture, and, via the development of real and relatable characters and their struggles, can teach a great deal about how people lived, loved and survived in order to convey the same information in a novel as would be learned from reading a dozen history books, inspiring empathy and a stronger connection to the people who came before us.

when is the secret history set

11 Answers2025-08-01

Why is that with the phones? They use a landline and the phone in the hall of their dorm. They don't have answering machines. No cell phones. Letters are important. Plans are made face to face. That in itself would make the time frame to be in the mid-70s or before answering machines became ubiquitous in the early 80s. The characters are isolated and that is technologically controlled.

What is the genre of 'Things We Never Got Over'?

8 Answers2025-07-01

In addition to really bringing out the romantic comedy in the book, the narrator also highlighted the grumpy lines of Knox and the over-the-top town busybodies. So in audiobook form, I would categorize this even more as a romantic comedy than I had when I read it. The humor is even more front-and-center in this form. I didn’t realize that genre was also affected by format. In print I focused more on the emotional inner lives of the characters. The same scenes were funny in audio because of the timing and characterisation of the narrator but in print I focused more on the witty dialogue and situation comedy. The humor was there in print but in audio it was more front and center. It’s a contemporary romance that can be more serious than funny or more funny than serious. It depends on how you read it and what resonates with you. That it is so versatile and can contain so much is a sign of a very good novel.