Holocaust

The Holocaust enters the novel through personal and historical recollection rather than as a narrated event. Agata recalls that a recipe associated with the Jewish inhabitants of Stryków survived the Holocaust, although more than ninety-nine per cent of that community did not; elsewhere, she relates the wartime and postwar history of Polish troops and displaced people to her grandfather’s sense of betrayal. Together, these moments make historical catastrophe part of the characters’ present-tense conversations about inheritance, belonging, and memory.

A Recipe and a Lost Community

At dinner, Agata explains that the recipe she has prepared is from the nineteenth century and was passed down through generations of Stryków’s Jewish inhabitants. Its survival gives an ordinary domestic object a history extending beyond the people who preserved it: the recipe endured the Holocaust, while more than ninety-nine per cent of the community did not. The contrast is concise but consequential. Continuity survives in a fragment of inherited practice, while the scale of the community’s destruction remains present in the act of naming what was lost.

The conversation also unsettles assumptions about inheritance. When Jo asks whether Agata is Jewish, Agata says she is not; nor is she Polish. Born in Britain and holding British citizenship, she has Polish parents and could qualify for Polish citizenship, but had never previously considered doing so. Her account does not make her the representative of the community whose recipe she describes. Instead, it shows how history can reach someone through family background, cultural objects, and the choices that suddenly acquire new significance.

Polish Displacement and Inherited Betrayal

Agata broadens the discussion from the recipe and Stryków to the history of Polish troops who fought alongside the British. She recalls Winston Churchill’s promise that the British people would remember their debt to those troops, followed by his agreement at the Yalta Conference to let Russia retain large areas of Poland. Agata says that more than a million Poles were displaced, including many of the very soldiers who had fought with Britain; some refused to return to Poland, and thirty died by suicide rather than do so.

The account connects political decisions to the lives of those made to bear their consequences. Agata describes her grandfather’s response as a sense of ultimate betrayal. She also identifies the Polish Resettlement Act as the British Government’s response, allowing the troops, their families, and others affected by the annexation to remain in Britain or come to live there. The law offers a concrete consequence of displacement, but does not erase the contradiction Agata emphasizes between Britain’s wartime alliance and the postwar settlement.

Memory in the Present

These references occur in an intimate conversation between Agata and Jo, but their subject is larger than personal ancestry. The recipe makes historical memory tangible through something passed from one generation to another; the account of displacement traces how public decisions become family history. Agata’s comment that times have changed follows her description of wartime service, territorial loss, and resettlement, leaving the contrast between promised remembrance and political outcome unresolved.

The Holocaust is not presented here as a complete history or as a backdrop detached from the plot. It is one of the losses against which the characters understand what can survive: a recipe, a family’s account, or a remembered sense of injustice. By placing this history within a conversation about identity and belonging, the novel shows memory as an inheritance that can remain consequential even when the person receiving it has not previously considered what that inheritance means.