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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
By the time Who Do You Think You Are takes her to Warsaw, Magda is a “walking bruise.” It is Christmas, and Warsaw is a winter wonderland. While the cameras are set up in Danuta’s apartment, Magda waits in the bitter cold. When Magda enters, Danuta is too old to stand to greet her. While Magda holds her hand, Danuta talks of how her family hid guns for the resistance; she remembers consoling the crying Jewish boy. While Peter doubted himself, Danuta is set in her ways: anyone who betrayed Poland’s cause was a “vulture.” The next day, former members of Peter’s unit and historians at the Warsaw Uprising Museum tell Magda that Peter was a hero.
Although Magda did not experience Ireland’s or Warsaw’s harsh histories, she arrives in Warsaw as though she had—like a “walking bruise.” As the lasting mark of a blow that happened in the past, Magda’s sense of being bruised illustrates her situation: she did not experience the violence or the suffering firsthand, but, as an inheritor of her ancestors’ suffering, she bears its marks. This suggests that the healing of this trauma lies in her hands, in a certain sense.
Themes
One night, Magda and Magda Zawadzka discuss the role that trauma played in creating their family. Cousin Magda tells Magda that the family smuggled guns into the Ghetto for the Jews. When Magda goes to Ryszard’s, Ryszard gives her Peter’s letters, which feel like “communication from the grave.” Ryszard says that, after the Uprising, the angered Germans torched the city, killing 200,000 people; the only way to escape was through the sewers.
In an earlier chapter, Peter said that writing to Ryszard had been like confession, in the Catholic sense, since Ryszard is the only person he knew who had done what Peter had done. Therefore, when these letters get to Magda, they feel to her like records of Peter’s actual self, speaking to her from beyond the grave.
Themes
The only time Peter expressed having felt fear was when he fled through the sewer pipe. He detailed “shit lapping” and dead bodies, and he could not light a torch for fear of being caught. Former Boy and Girl Scouts acted as guides through the sewers, and Peter momentarily lost his guide. The crew of Who Do You Think You Are takes Magda into this sewer; while inside, she has the crew turn off the lights; however, this is a crude simulation of what the experience must have been for Peter. Again, Peter “elude[s]” Magda.
The image of the sewer epitomizes the horrors that Peter faced during the war. The sewer is inhumanly disgusting as well as terrifying. What is more, the fact that former boy and girl scouts led escapees through the sewer twistedly depicts the absurdity or wartime life.
Themes
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