The concept of the “stone of madness” symbolizes the part of Peter that Magda struggles to accept, which is passed down to her through legacy. Magda takes the symbol of the stone of madness from a Hieronymus Bosch painting called The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, which depicts surgeons removing (in a process called trepanning) from the brain of a patient the “stone,” which, in the 15th century, was thought to be the cause of insanity. In Magda’s eyes, Peter’s stone of madness is the simultaneous guilt and pride that he feels for the killings and other atrocities he committed during World War II. At the beginning of her memoir, Magda feels that she has inherited Peter’s stone of madness: she carries a deep sense of shame, and feels instinctively that she is a bad person. In using the stone of madness to illustrate this legacy of shame, Magda illustrates her lifelong aim of removing her stone of madness—accepting herself and her father’s past.
Through a long, complicated process of researching and talking to her family about the past, Magda deepens her understanding of Peter’s stone of madness. As well as shame, the stone is a unique conflation of right and wrong that was necessitated by wartime circumstances: Peter, having been trained to kill anyone who turned traitor, lived his life prepared to kill his children if they turned out to be cowards. By the time Magda realizes this, she no longer conceives of the stone of madness as something unique to Peter and which she unwillingly inherited. In fact, Magda distinguishes her own stone: her fear that she is a coward. In this way, Magda takes ownership of her past. In doing so, she performs her own form of “trepanation,” accepting her stone of madness instead of removing it. Starting as a symbol for Peter’s complicated psyche and ending as a symbol for the contradictory nature of identity itself, the stone of madness illustrates the process of one’s reckoning with their legacy and themselves—a process which ends in self-acceptance.
The Stone of Madness Quotes in Reckoning
I swear sometimes I can feel that stone in my head. A palpable presence, an unwelcome thing that I want to squeeze out of my skull like a plum pip, using nothing but the sheer pressure of thought and concentration. If I just think hard enough…
That stone was my father’s legacy to me, his keepsake. Beneath his genial surface, somewhere in the depths, I would sometimes catch a glimpse—of a smooth, bone-colored stone. A stone made of calcified guilt and shame.
There was a dark side to my Marcia Brady madness. I knew that I liked her in a way that was different from the other kids. I didn’t just want to be her friend. I wanted to kiss her. […] And, without being told, I knew this was not ‘normal.’ Somehow I knew that I posed what researchers call a ‘social identity threat’ to myself.
It was not just Germans who hated the Jews—it was Poles as well. Betraying them, selling them, profiteering and collaborating in their destruction.
[…]
It was as if someone had plunged a red-hot iron into my sympathetic nervous system. Pain shot through my whole body. I lay on my bed trembling. The Poles were not just the good people. We were also the bad people. We had not helped the Jews. Had my father hurt the Jews?
Now I would say it was survivor’s guilt. By a fluke my father had made it out of Poland and so his children had been spared all of this. I wanted to make it up to my Polish family for all they had suffered. But how? There was no plan. And no relief.
He was reproaching her—for what? Her weakness?—and he was recasting her response as self-indulgent. A useless thing that was no help to anyone.
As a man his job was not to feel. It was to act, to do something. Maybe Izabella’s father was right—feelings are what get people killed.
But dear God, if you cannot weep at Auschwitz?
I was thirty-one years old. I was a brave Pole. I felt the expectation to man up, and my emotions fell into step with my father’s. They floated off like vapor. I felt, at that moment, nothing except irritation with my mother’s weakness.
Growing up I had glimpsed [Peter’s] capacity for cold-bloodedness. I was never afraid of my father but I began to wonder how much I was the child of his darkness as well as his light. It wasn’t what my father did or said or told me. It was what he felt. At times it emanated from him like a force field. I was irradiated with his guilt. Whatever it was he had done I had to make my own peace with it.
My father knew that even in his war, a just war where Hitler had to be stopped, the balance of good and evil was no simple thing.
[…]
‘I was good at it. Good at organizing the aktions.’ And there it was. The bastard emotion. Hard, shining, gleaming pride.
Was it the stone of madness? His pride in his efficiency as a killer? It seemed he was simultaneously proud and ashamed of what he had done. Maybe that was what he couldn’t forgive himself for.
[Peter] was trying to cure me of weakness. In order to help me survive he thought he needed to expunge normal human frailty. […] He tried to make us strong like him because if we succumbed there was only one possible course of action. He would have to do his duty. He would have to kill us.
He was toughening me up so that he wouldn’t have to kill me.
This, then, is the stone of his madness.
And I think: this is what war is. It is a universe in which doing the right thing is almost always simultaneously doing the wrong thing. And that is madness.
The Stone of Madness Symbol Timeline in Reckoning
