The Things We Cannot Say

by Kelly Rimmer

What happens when stories like theirs are lost? What happens when there’s no one left to pass your experience on to, or you just can’t bring yourself to share it?

something more. Anything more. Maybe if she could have shared some of her story, I could have learned from it, I could have taught my children from it—we could have built a better world from the hard lessons she surely learned.

“How God must hate me…to leave me to suffer like this? Surely…”

We weren’t Jew and Catholic, we weren’t even man and

woman—we were simply two human beings, grieving an inhuman act.

“We will always find our way back to each other, Alina,”

“Our love is

bigger than this war—I promis...

We are made for each other…meant to be together. It doesn’t matter what happens in this life or the next, Alina. We’ll always find our way back to each other.”

If all that we had left in the world was each other at the end of this journey, that was more than enough for me to look forward to.

I love being a mother, and I love being a wife. I even love being a daughter and a granddaughter. But as I stand here on the mountaintop, I’m not any of those things. I am simply Alice, and for one breathtaking moment, I’m completely present.

“War breaks us down to nothing more than our most selfish will to survive—but when we rise above that instinct, miracles can still happen.

I knew with absolute certainty that small problems in a country can become immense tragedies when left unchecked. It started small in Germany. It even started small in Poland, long before the

occupation. It started with a small group of people harassing and vandalizing and desecrating, and it ended with trainloads of my countrymen shipped to furnaces and dumped into a river.

Tomasz had promised me we’d always find each other.

Distance, time—these things were surely irrelevant against a love as big as ours—one day, he’d appear without warning just like he did last time, and life would begin again in earnest.

I never stopped longing, and I never, ever s...

We would always find our way back to one another.

Always.

Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without

explanation. But when there’s love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic.

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.

I was inspired by so many stories of love and survival, even in the face of unimaginable oppression and cruelty.