The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer

Author:Kelly Rimmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Published: 2019-01-22T17:17:55+00:00

* * *

We had to maintain a militant schedule now that Tomasz was in the cellar. He’d leave the house just before my parents went to bed—taking with him whatever food Mama offered him, and he’d return in the morning, usually just before dawn. As he came back to the house, he or Mama would wake me, and I’d spend some time talking with him in the cellar. While I was down there, Mama would make breakfast and, because she was there to keep watch, we’d leave the latch open.

Even with the light from the windows in the upstairs, I never got used to the darkness of the cellar. Every single time I climbed down the ladder, I’d feel sick to my stomach at the darkness and the musty, dusty scent. We would sit on the makeshift bed and Tomasz would wrap his arms around me to help me through the panic of it—then we’d leap away from one another guiltily whenever we heard Mama walk near to the opening.

We talked about so many things in those weeks. We talked about the agony of the separation we’d survived, and we daydreamed about our future. Now that there were no secrets between us, Tomasz told me all about the work he was doing and his fears for his friends.

“Some farmers do this only for the money, and I wish we were not so desperate as to use those people,” Tomasz told me. “The man hosting Saul’s family makes me very nervous indeed. We want to move them from that house as soon as I can, but it’s just so difficult to find suitable places.”

“And the others you are helping?”

“It is just a handful of people, Alina. I can’t travel far because I have to go on foot each night, so I just take food to those on farms I can reach from here. We wouldn’t use the empty farmhouses at first because we assumed the farmers had been moved to make way for German settlers, but there has been no sign of that so far in this district and the shelter was too good to waste. It’s perplexing, though, why the Nazis would clear the farms and not use the houses.”

“Maybe the farmers are fleeing into the cities? I’ve always wondered if life in the cities is easier.”

Tomasz gave a bitter laugh.

“Not from what I saw in Warsaw. Not by a mile.”

I had no solutions and no insight, but I loved partnering with him in bearing the burden of the problem.

Sundays had once been the best day of the week for me, but now, they were almost the worst. We had decided that it was too dangerous to tell Emilia or even Truda and Mateusz the truth about Tomasz. The fewer people who knew our secret, Father had sighed, the better our chances of keeping it, and it was too much to ask of an eight-year-old to keep a secret as big as this one.

That meant Tomasz would sit hidden in the cellar beneath his sister while she sat at the dining room table to chat with her new family.

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