The shadow of World War II haunts the history of Magda Szubanski’s family. In Poland, the Szubanskis risked their lives to resist oppression from Germany and Russia, and they went to great lengths to protect persecuted Jews. Despite the family’s good intentions, however, Magda laments her inability to calculate the good that came from her family’s actions; instead, she’s only able to calculate the bad. For example, she can count how many German spies Peter murdered during his time with the Polish Underground Army, and she can calculate all the friends whose lives he tried but failed to save. In light of these tragedies, it’s difficult for Magda to justify the violence her father committed during the war—and even harder for her to understand the personal moral framework that allowed Peter to justify his actions. Peter defends his actions, arguing that during wartime, “doing the right thing involves simultaneously doing the wrong thing.”
Startlingly, though, Peter continued to subscribe to this paradoxical morality long after the war’s conclusion, parenting Magda harshly in order to stomp out a weakness that he had come to see, during the war, as dormant in all people. Peter was prepared “to kill” his children if they turned out to be “collaborators”—those weak enough to succumb under pressure of any kind. After long being horrified by this seemingly irrational mentality, Magda eventually comes to understand that her father’s moral ambiguity was the understandable consequence of the harsh and immoral circumstances in which Peter’s family found themselves during wartime. Though under normal circumstances it may seem “mad” to do wrong (i.e., commit murder) in the name of good, it was what Peter had to do to survive. Magda’s coming to terms with the violence of her family’s past thus challenges a conventional, simplistic understanding of morality, showing how a person’s circumstances can complicate their sense of right and wrong.
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Morality, Survival, and Perspective ThemeTracker
Morality, Survival, and Perspective 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.
I had never seen a photograph of a real dead body. A murdered body. Lying face down was something that looked like an old bundle of torn clothing. But there seemed to be a hand attached to it. And another hand, unconnected, a few inches away. What appeared to be a head was lying face down and had a hole the size of a fifty-cent piece in the back of it. But it was the body I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t there.
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.
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.
When [Peter] went into that sewer he was a man with a country, a family, a future. When he climbed out he had lost everything.
[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.
