Reckoning: Chapter 31: The Little Jewish Boy Summary & Analysis

In Magda’s home video of Peter, Peter told her that, during the war, Jadwiga sheltered Jews in the family’s house. Once, they housed a friend’s wife and son, a Jewish boy who spoke only Yiddish. With an insensitive tone, Peter says that the boy threw tantrums and sang in Yiddish and that everyone wanted to get rid of him. In Poland, the penalty for hiding a Jew was death; when a childhood friend of Peter’s sought shelter at the Szubanskis’, Andrzej rebuked him for endangering the family.

During the war, not many Poles dared hide Jews; some Poles charged the Jews money to stay, while others robbed and sold them to the Gestapo, believing that Jews from the ghetto had a lot of money. Chafing at her father’s anti-Semitic thinking, Magda says that this does not paint a nice picture of Polish people; Peter says that Polish people were no worse than anyone else. Although Jadwiga did not rob the Jewish family, she eventually sent them away at the insistence of the neighbors. Afterward, the Szubanskis feared that the Jewish boy, when tortured or bribed, would give away the family who had sheltered him. Privately, Magda wonders why Jadwiga put her family at risk by hiding the boy and how Peter felt about her choice to do so.