Reckoning: Chapter 16: Grüber Summary & Analysis

When Magda is 16, she and her friends apply to work at the new McDonald’s; however, Magda is not hired. She then applies to every store at the mall, and a café hires her as a dishwasher. Two days later, however, the café fires her for being lazy. Margaret attributes Magda’s lethargy to hypoglycemia, a condition with which Barb had once been diagnosed by a doctor named Grüber.

When the family mispronounces doctor Grüber’s name, Peter corrects them. Peter, with ironic nonchalance, tells a story: after the Warsaw Uprising, Peter went to a POW camp. When the Soviets attacked in 1945, the Germans retreated, taking the prisoners with them. As part of Hitler’s Death March, the attempt to walk prisoners to death, leading them through bitter cold conditions; the Germans shot anyone who got sick. Peter and several others escaped, hiding in a haystack. Making their way to a house where an old Polish man lived, they hid until the man’s grandson naively told a passing German patrol—whose leader was Grüber—about them.

Killing time until the war ended, Grüber and the prisoners walked, talking about football and movies; he dodged other German patrols and let the prisoners sleep inside in beds. Sometimes, the prisoners carried the patrol’s rifles to share the load. When Grüber let them go so that they could work in a factory, another patrol caught Peter and his friends and sent them to a camp. When they were freed by the Soviets, Peter stayed with single women to protect them from the Russians, who were given the freedom to do whatever they pleased to the prisoners. As far as Peter knows, Grüber spent the rest of the war skiing with his prisoners. Someone shot Grüber the day the war ended, but Peter can’t remember who.