“You need to trust me. I can keep your secrets, Tomasz.”
The subject of keeping secrets is discussed throughout the narrative. This is because the entire storyline of the book revolves around the necessity to have, keep, maintain, and protect secrets. This particular quote appears almost halfway into the book and yet is still able to work as foreshadowing. The secrets of Tomasz, in particular, will be of supreme significance to the climax toward which the story incessantly moves. Much of the story takes place during World War II and Tomasz is part of the resistance to Nazi oppression. Alina is Tomasz's fiancé and has her own secrets necessitated by the abominations and atrocities of the fascist clampdown. This quote is one of many which includes discussions of secrets and this is only appropriate. After all, another way to describe secrets is to acknowledge them as the things we are not supposed to say.
"We had a shared history—a friendship—and even in those circumstances he extended warmth to me. Saul Weiss had lost everything because of people like me ; people who didn’t have the courage to take a stand, and still? He chose to smile. That was the day that I broke inside and I knew I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Tomasz has been conscripted to fight for the Nazis against his will and over his moral objections. He is alluding to that moral objection and desire to be released from an obligation to fight for the Nazi cause when he talks here about lacking the fortitude to stand up for his principles rather than simply state them and give in. The book takes place in two separate time periods, the World War II era and the present day. What will connect the two separate but related narrative threads will be the relationship established between Tomasz and Dr. Weiss. Within this quote is a very subtly inserted but powerful bit of foreshadowing. The nature of that foreshadowing will serve to be the engine driving those things which must not be said until it is time for secrets to finally be revealed.
"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."
This novel was published in 2019, by which time a very definite shift in American society had already planted deep roots. The story of fascism's rise in Germany that began with a handful of angry thugs is one that by the publication date had taken on an unexpected resonance nearly one-hundred years after the rise of Nazism on the back of Adolf Hitler's madness. Alina is here to address what remains a common problem in dealing with the potential for a resurgence of fascist authoritarianism. Words like Hitler and Nazis produce a kneejerk reaction that immediately leaps to the ovens Alina references here. As a result, there has long been an unspoken rule that discourages people from comparing anything to Nazism and anyone to Hitler. But as Alina directly points out in this quote, that immediate leap to concentration camps and the Holocaust started out on a much lesser scale of malevolence. To compare a sweeping madness to Hitler's Germany does not simply encompass the worst which came toward the end. It is also an indictment of its beginning which began, as Aline reminds the reader, simply with nothing more than menacing acts of vandalism and bullying. This reality should remove comparing a potentially growing threat of Nazi-style fascism as one of those things which we cannot say.
