Reckoning takes its name from Magda Szubanski’s lifelong effort to come to terms with her father’s complicated past. Peter Szubanski, a former assassin for Poland’s Underground Army during World War II, does not hide that he murdered—albeit in the name of the good—many people, including women and young boys. Uncertain whether Peter’s actions were courageous or depraved, Magda travels to Warsaw to learn more about the evils that Peter both faced and enacted during the war. Despite her attempts to uncover the truth, she cannot stop questioning whether or not Peter was a good man—whether the sins of his past will forever shape his legacy, or whether he can move beyond them.
Moreover, Magda is frustrated by her father’s seeming acceptance of his past behavior—to her, it seems that Peter should feel more shame and guilt about the violence he committed as a young man, regardless of the dire circumstances of war that required him to carry out that violence in the first place. Ultimately, though, Magda realizes that her father’s ownership of his past is courageous rather than cowardly, and that guilt is an ineffective means of coming to terms with the past: indeed, neither she nor Peter has the power to go back in time and right the wrongs of the past. On the other hand, she does have the power—like Peter—to accept the things about herself that she cannot change and take ownership of her actions and her identity. In an act of courage, Magda publicly comes out about her own main source of guilt—her identity as a lesbian—embracing a part of herself about which she previously felt guilty and ashamed. In her quest to come to terms with her father’s past, Magda learns that a person’s legacy isn’t just informed by the things they’ve done. Ultimately, a person’s legacy is shaped by their ability to make peace with their past and embrace all aspects of their identity—the good and the bad.
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Guilt and Legacy 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.
We were tugboats in the river of history, my father and I, pulling in opposite directions. He needed to forget. I need to remember. For him, only the present moment would set him free. For me, the key lies buried in the past. The only way forward is back.
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?
It was from [his] arrested and idealized adolescent memory […] that my father’s […] standards of excellence were born, like Pallas Athena out of the head of Zeus. There was always something strangely Leni Riefenstahl-ish about my father’s veneration of sporting prowess. I recoiled from it instantly and forcefully: the moment I became proficient at a sport I began to feel like a Nazi and would stop.
How could I explain what I hadn’t even begun to understand myself? That I was locked in the Jedi mind trick of my father’s denial? That I was the victim of a victim. All I knew was what I feared—that I was not like other human beings and I was devoid of normal emotion. And there was no way I was going to let these [friends], kind and patient as they were, see that.
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.
[Peter] squints into the distance as though he might find…what? Answers? Justice? Wisdom?
‘How would I react?’ he asks straight at the camera. ‘You see you don’t know your reaction until you are actually there, until you are confronted with the circumstances. There were people swearing what they wouldn’t do. And when it came to the crunch…they bloody well did 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.
Was this the gift of my Irish inheritance—the ability to survive loss but at the cost of loving easily? […] when I began to sob uncontrollably—inexplicably—it was for my family. For my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents and beyond. And for Mary Jane’s ten nameless children buried in the cold Irish earth. And maybe also for myself. Because I wondered, in that moment, if this was why I have never had children of my own.
[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.
‘That’s what I believe is real heroism. People who are afraid, have their pants full, and yet—they go and do something. Then you say, By God! It took courage to do that! But if you’re not afraid, it’s easy.’
And it dawns on me: that’s me. [Peter] is describing me. That is what I have just done.
