Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Reckoning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt and Legacy
Morality, Survival, and Perspective
Sexuality and Shame
Body Image and Publicity
Indifference vs. Feeling
Summary
Analysis
In Magda’s home video of Peter, Peter told her that, during the war, Jadwiga sheltered Jews in the family’s house. Once, they housed a friend’s wife and son, a Jewish boy who spoke only Yiddish. With an insensitive tone, Peter says that the boy threw tantrums and sang in Yiddish and that everyone wanted to get rid of him. In Poland, the penalty for hiding a Jew was death; when a childhood friend of Peter’s sought shelter at the Szubanskis’, Andrzej rebuked him for endangering the family.
Magda alludes to the Jewish boy many times throughout her memoir, but she tells his full story here for the first time. This delay creates mystery around the boy, thereby emphasizing the moral complexity that his story represents. Because the boy’s behavior put the Szubanskis in danger, they hated as well as loved him. This illustrates the emotional ambiguity that the memoir argues is central to the war experience.
Themes
During the war, not many Poles dared hide Jews; some Poles charged the Jews money to stay, while others robbed and sold them to the Gestapo, believing that Jews from the ghetto had a lot of money. Chafing at her father’s anti-Semitic thinking, Magda says that this does not paint a nice picture of Polish people; Peter says that Polish people were no worse than anyone else. Although Jadwiga did not rob the Jewish family, she eventually sent them away at the insistence of the neighbors. Afterward, the Szubanskis feared that the Jewish boy, when tortured or bribed, would give away the family who had sheltered him. Privately, Magda wonders why Jadwiga put her family at risk by hiding the boy and how Peter felt about her choice to do so.
The Jewish boy forced the Szubanskis to make nearly impossible choices. No matter what they decided to do, they sacrificed something that had value to them: one option required them to send an innocent boy to his death, and the other option meant putting their entire family in danger.
Themes
