‘We weren’t rich, but we weren’t deprived in any way. Both our parents worked at a school,’ recalls Barbara, whose married name is Wiśniewska, when I spend three days talking to her in Vancouver in June 2008.
Her testimony differs from that in certain of Kapuściński’s accounts which suggest he came from an impoverished background in Pińsk. It is true that teachers earned little in those days, but they belonged to a social stratum corresponding to the modern middle class; they were the cultural élite, especially in a provincial town like Pińsk. Photographs of their several-storey house also reveal that the Kapuścińskis did not live in a shack.
Yet the memories of poverty in Pińsk are a partly justified piece of literary self-creation. Little Rysio really did see poverty all around him. Although the Kapuścińskis themselves were not indigent, poverty dominated the local landscape; it was a ubiquitous element of his childhood. (‘This year’s spring,’ we read in a 1936 issue of Nowe Echo Pińskie (Pińsk New Echo), ‘fortunately quite an early one, has stirred new hopes among the unemployed masses that the tough winter is over, when frequently there were no potatoes in the house for dinner, and when gaunt, hungry children huddled together in cold, unheated hovels’).
Over the years, Kapuściński relates pieces from the book he planned to (but never did) write about Pińsk in the 1930s in interviews and chats, such as:
I think that era and Pińsk’s pleasant climate of co-existing, cooperating multiculturalism is worth salvaging in the modern, stressed-out world . . .
I was shaped by everything that shapes so-called borderlands man. Borderlands man is always and everywhere an intercultural person – someone ‘in between’. He is a person who learns from childhood, from playing in the yard, that people are different, and that otherness is simply a feature of mankind . . . In Pińsk one kid would bring a herring from home, another a piece of koulibiac, and a third a chop . . . Being from the borderlands means being open to other cultures, or more than that – borderlands people do not regard other cultures as different, but as part of their own culture . . .
It was a town full of friendly people and friendly streets. Until the outbreak of war, I never saw any conflict there. It was a place without pomp or show, a place full of modest, ordinary people. As teachers, my parents were those sorts of people too. Maybe that’s why I always felt all right later on in the so-called Third World, where people are distinguished not by wealth but hospitality, not by ostentation but cooperation.4
Was there really such an idyllic world on the borders where several nations, religions and cultures met? In that part of the world, during the 1930s, when the entire region seethed with ethnic, religious and class hatred?
It is 1930, and parliamentary elections are approaching. Piński Przegląd Diecezjalny – the ‘Pińsk Diocesan Review’, a periodical issued by the church – asks
whether the non-Christian, or unfaithful, indifferent Christian will make sure that only laws which are in accordance with the teachings of the Gospels will emerge from the Sejm and the Senate? Of course not. And if the majority of members of parliament are non-Christian or not very Christian, one can always expect non-Christian laws. Hence the final conclusion: to vote only for righteous, sincere Christians.5
And in another issue of the same journal: ‘From the pulpit one should clearly give the congregation the following instructions: . . . not to vote for the candidate lists of other denominations (Jewish, Orthodox, etc.)’.6
The Polish press issued in Pińsk and Polesie in the 1930s never stops warning of threats – from communists, Jews, Belarusians and Ukrainians.
Dwutygodnik Kresowy – the Borderlands Bi-Weekly – calls for a battle against ‘Jewishness’ and for ‘the establishment of full Polishness’. It warns that ‘despite its best intentions’, society ‘will not cope with Jewishness’ on its own; ‘the municipal authorities must insist on legislation that recognizes the precedence of Poles in Poland’.7
The overwhelming majority of citizens in Pińsk are Jews, yet the pro-government Echo Pińskie (Pińsk Echo) demands that Poles should hold the majority on the city council and should have their own mayor – and that is what happens.
Unlike cities in the Białystok region, as well as Wilno (now Vilnius) or Lwów (now Lviv), Pińsk in the 1930s never goes so far as to institute pogroms against the Jewish population, and the influence of the nationalist camp is small. However, according to the Jewish historian of Pińsk, Azriel Shohat, the city’s political landscape is far from idyllic:
This discrimination was strongly felt in Pinsk. Despite the fact that it was a Jewish city for the most part, the city’s mayor was a Pole and, until 1927, the city was run by an administrative body appointed by the Polish authorities. The city council included only two Jews and they, too, were appointed by the Polish authorities.8
In the 1930s, Polish nationalists are often heard proclaiming ‘each to one’s own for one’s own’, which serves as a form of incitement to boycott Jewish shops. This campaign, and the accompanying rise in anti-Semitism, does not bypass Pińsk. People talk about it at home, on the street, at work and in church.
Years later, the same Jewish historian will write,
Anti-Semitic students who came from outside the city plotted attacks against the Jews. However neither of these attempts succeeded. The Polish businesses could not compete with the Jewish ones and the Jewish youth knew how to silence the Polish hooligans and caused them to flee the city. 9
In interviews and conversations, Kapuściński idealized the land of his childhood, depicting Pińsk as a perfect, harmonious place, where tolerance reigned and people regarded mutual dissimilarity as a treasure. Yet in his notes for the book on Pińsk, that image becomes complicated, full of stains and flaws. Here, for instance, is an extract titled ‘Good Manners for Christian Children’:
[W]hen I look into the depths of time towards my childhood, the first thing I see is the dog catcher’s wagon coming down our bumpy road, Błotna Street, later called Perets Street and now Suvorov . . . when the dog catchers see a dog, they rush towards it and surround it, emitting wild shrieks, and then you hear the swish of a lasso and the terrified animal howling as they drag it away and throw it in a cage. Soon after, the wagon moves on.
Why these nasty, scruffy men are catching the poor dogs is something every Christian child will discover if he gets up to any mischief. Be good, he or she will then hear Mama or Grandma warn, or the dog catchers will take you away to make matzos! And so thanks to the constant presence of the dog catchers on the streets of our town, the Christian children are well brought up – not one of them wants to be eaten as an anonymous piece of brittle kosher flatbread.10
Are tales about Jews performing the ritual murder of Christian children so as to extract their blood and add it to their matzos – a monstrous myth, repeated in churches and Catholic homes, which for centuries was at the root of intolerance, pogroms and crimes against Jews – something little Rysio hears on the street, from neighbours, from his relatives?
His sister, Basia, a year younger, remembers stories of this kind. Here is one she told me: ‘An old Jew with a long beard once accosted me in the street. “Wait here,” he said, “I’ll go indoors and fetch you some sweets.” So I stand outside his house, waiting. A neighbour appears, and she says: “What are you doing here, Basia?” “I’m waiting for him,” I say, pointing at the Jew’s house. “He promised to bring me some sweets.” “Run away from here at once, child! He wants to kidnap you for his matzos!” ’
She then added, ‘In those days people used to say the Jews needed children’s blood for their rituals.’
In the summer of 1942, the army of the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union, taking Pińsk in the process. Eleven thousand of the city’s Jews were killed at once in two mass