Some things are too painful to talk about: the death of a child, losing one’s faith, the near-extermination of an entire race. Yet, the Polish 2015 Academy Award winning film Ida shares all of these stories—and more—and does so through subtle imagery and appeals to the viewer’s emotion. Following the story of a novice nun known as Anna, the film begins when the Mother Superior of Anna’s Order tells Anna that before she takes her vows she must visit her aunt. Ida tells the tale of Anna’s journey to meet her aunt, her discovery that she is not the Christian Anna but the Jewish Ida Lebenstein, and her realization that her family died in the Holocaust. In this film, stories are not told outright, but evoked through fragmented references and images that mirror the reality of Polish history: some things are better forgotten because they are too painful to remember.

As she embarks on her journey, Ida trades the routine of her convent for the wild world of her aunt and brings some of the quiet of the abbey to the bars and concert halls of Soviet-era Poland. With her hair covered, her eyes lowered, and her mouth often closed, Ida seems submissive but also gives the impression she’s listening for something unspoken. She asks questions when necessary to dig up her family’s history, but takes action in reverential silence. The decision to center a narrative about the unspoken truths of the Holocaust on a quiet, aspiring nun highlights the missing stories from this period of history. In a world that buzzes with the new sounds of jazz, Ida’s few, carefully-chosen words remind viewers of the voices that have been silenced.

Though nearly twenty years have passed since Ida’s family was killed, no one seems to know what happened to them. Ida turns first to her aunt Wanda, who then turns to the family that now inhabits the Lebensteins’ former home, but they can offer no answers. In the confusion and evasions that ensue, the film uncovers the shame still attached to Polish memory of World War II: the guilt of catholic Poles who turned against their neighbors and watched as Jews were “led to slaughter.” In a climactic graveyard scene, the man who has confessed to murdering Ida’s family digs up their bones.  His silent atonement becomes a moment of profound noise in the quiet of the Lebensteins’ unmarked grave.

In this silence of unspoken stories, the few words that hold true meaning stand out: names like Ida, Anna, and Lebenstein. Ida’s name almost vanished: her Jewish name gets exchanged for Anna at the orphanage because she can pass as a gentile with her red hair and fair skin. However, Ida’s name is not the only one missing in this film: there are no gravestones left to record the names of Ida’s family or Wanda’s son. Instead, Ida finds small relics—photographs and pieces of stained glass—that evoke the memory of her family. While visiting her family’s former home, Ida finds a stained glass window in the barn that reminds her of Wanda’s descriptions of her mother’s artwork. In the stained glass, Ida finds a small piece of her mother that has survived war and time. Similarly, during one night at Wanda’s home, Ida sorts through photographs as Wanda reminisces about their family. In these photographs, Ida discovers that she looks like her mother and that she was related to a little boy—a boy who she later discovers was her aunt’s son. Later, when Wanda tells Ida that her son was with Ida’s parents when they died, Ida’s childhood in the silence of the convent makes sense: she understands why her aunt could not raise a niece who would constantly remind her of her absent son.

Jews like Ida’s parents were often buried in unmarked graves during the Holocaust—their names erased and their memories nearly forgotten. This loss of Jewish life and memory portrayed in Ida reminded this reviewer of the Jewish history about which I had the chance to learn on a Holocaust education and service trip to Poland called “Together, Restoring their Names.” Watching as Ida and Wanda tried to put together the pieces of their family history into a coherent and memorable story, I could almost feel the drill I had used to break apart a schoolyard fence, part of infrastructure built by the Nazi regime during World War II.  The large stones I pulled from the wall were tombstones that the Nazis had appropriated from Jewish graves. As Ida touched her mother’s stained glass and Wanda retrieved her son’s bones, I remembered wrapping my hands around the piece of stone and turning it over to find a Hebrew inscription, a name. In order to find her mother and father, Wanda’s son, and so many other forgotten Jews, Ida slips into the silence of guilt and sadness to find missing names and relics. Names that you might find when returning a skull to its proper resting place or touching the bits of art that loved ones left behind. The ones of which it’s too difficult to speak, but that it might just be possible to touch and remember.