Years later, Nahum Boneh, a witness to that place and time who, after the war, headed the association of Pińsk Jews in Israel, wrote that
it was very dangerous for a Jew to be a member of a partisan group. In those days any Gentile who encountered a lone Jew could murder him or hand him over to the Germans. Among the partisans too there were anti-Semites who exploited every occasion (and there were many) to kill Jews, even though they were partisans.11
Among the accounts gathered by Boneh, there is also evidence that some Poles from Pińsk helped their Jewish neighbours, but Boneh’s verdict leaves no room for illusion: ‘the entire Gentile population waited passively and even happily for the extermination of the Jews and the opportunity to steal their possessions.’12
Kapuściński’s Pińsk, ‘a town full of friendly people and friendly streets’, was a wonderful Arcadia, the harmonious world that in adult life he desired for Africa, Latin America and all the inhabitants of the poor South. Was it also an element of his literary self-creation? A bit of myth-making to underpin the biography of an ‘interpreter of cultures’, as he wished to be seen at the end of his life? It would usefully point to the roots of this predisposition: here is a man of dialogue and many encounters with the Other, who has lived and breathed multiculturalism since childhood and has it in his blood.
Between the Pińsk of the home archive – the Pińsk of the dog catchers, where Poles murder Jews themselves or turn them over to the Germans to be murdered – and the idyllic Arcadia of Kapuściński’s casual talk and interviews lies a yawning chasm. Indeed, the chasm is so broad that it is hard not to wonder whether these two images of the city never came together in the long-heralded book simply because they were so contradictory and so mutually repellent.
Their father taught practical technology; Barbara cannot remember what their mother taught. She may have given lessons on everything – reading, writing and arithmetic for the youngest schoolchildren.
During the day, Rysieczek (the diminutive name his mother gives him) and Żabcia (‘Froggie’, as she calls little Basia) are looked after by a nanny, the hunchbacked Masia. Following her own mother’s death, Maria Kapuścińska takes over the care of her teenage sister, Oleńka. Barbara’s glimmers of childhood memory indicate that her parents had a large circle of friends and acquaintances, and that social life flourished in their home.
To say that Rysieczek is the apple of his mother’s eye says nothing about their feelings or relationship. She loves her daughter, but she worships her son. He is the loveliest, the cleverest, the most intelligent. Maria Kapuścińska’s faith in her son’s genius – according to family friends who knew her after the war – goes much further than the average mother’s idolizing of a talented son. ‘My son, my son’ – she spoke of him adoringly, in a sort of elation, as Kapuściński’s widow, Alicja, described it.
His mother’s youth coincided with the period between the wars, an era when patriotism was often associated with a uniform. For Pińsk’s Polish minority, the main centre for parties and gatherings was the officers’ casino. There the Kapuścińskis attended elegant balls, with Maria – her hair styled like the film star Jadwiga Smosarska – wearing a little hat and looking proud of belonging to the élite. When twenty-something Rysiek, as a student at Warsaw University, came home from military training in a field uniform, he clicked his heels together and cried, ‘Second Lieutenant Ryszard Kapuściński reporting at home!’ whereupon his mother burst into tears and declared, ‘My son is an officer!’
Maria found it hard to bear her son’s long absences when, as a correspondent for the Polish Press Agency (PAP), he would disappear for months on end, sometimes spending more than a year at a time in Africa or Latin America and occasionally offering no signs of life for several weeks. Whenever he went away, he asked his friends to ‘keep an eye on my parents’. From afar he wrote loving letters to ‘Maminka’, as he started calling his mother when he returned from one of his first trips abroad, to Czechoslovakia.
To know at least where he was, what was occupying his thoughts, and what he was witnessing, his mother would go to the PAP’s head office on the corner of Jerozolimskie Avenue and Nowy Świat Street to ask for her son’s reports. Often she received his articles before they were issued in PAP bulletins. Only once was she deliberately not given a report to read. It was from Nigeria, in 1966, just after a coup d’état:
I was waiting for them to set me on fire . . . I felt an animal fear, a fear that struck me with paralysis; I stood rooted to the ground, as if I was buried up to the neck . . . My life was going to end in inhuman torment. My life was going to go out in flames . . . They waved a knife before my eyes. They pointed it at my heart.13
The editor, Wiesława Bolimowska, went to the head of the department, Michał Hoffman, and insisted: ‘We can’t let this go out, because Mrs Kapuścińska will die of a heart attack if she reads it.’ In order to stop the newspapers from reprinting the article, they blocked its publication in all the agency’s bulletins, which was a frequent practice. A decade later, it appeared as ‘The Burning Roadblocks’ in Kapuściński’s collection of reports titled The Soccer War. Maria Kapuścińska was no longer alive; she died in 1974 at the age of sixty-three.
The father, by contrast, enjoyed making fun of his son. Whenever Rysiek was keenly studying something, he always underlined important sentences in books – a habit he continued throughout life, initially as a renowned reporter and then as a world-famous writer – and his father would provoke him by saying: ‘Go to bed, Rysio. I’ll have the whole book underlined for you by morning.’
He also used to joke that Rysiek was of medium height, causing Maria to burst out, ‘What do you mean, medium? Rysio is tall!’ His father would laugh and say, ‘Rysio is medium taller and I’m medium smaller’, at which point his mother would end the debate by shouting, ‘What are you on about, old man? You’re small, and my son is tall!’
Rysiek could not look to his father for inspiring conversation about culture, books, politics or the world. For years he suffered from feeling he was a poorly educated provincial who had been given little at home and had had to achieve everything through hard work. Once he told me that as a young reporter, whenever he used to meet his fellow writers Kazimierz Dziewanowski and Wojciech Giełżyński, both of whom came from truly intellectual homes, he was ashamed to speak up. ‘They knew all about everything; they used to exchange names and book titles I had never even heard of,’ he said, perhaps with a note of pride at having outdistanced these colleagues. Yet many years earlier, as he sat with them not knowing what and how to contribute to the conversation, he must have felt pain rather than pride.
Józef Kapuściński only dimly understood his son’s occupation. He was outraged to see newspapers featuring the name ‘Kapuściński’ spread across the floor to be trodden on or used to line the waste bin. A conscientious and dutiful man, he claimed to have never once been late for a lesson. He found it irritating that his son shut himself in his room for hours at a stretch doing goodness knows what (in other words, writing) instead of going to work and earning a living for his family. In Józef ’s mind, someone who went to work was working, while someone who sat at home for days on end was not.
Once when he came to visit his son and daughter-in-law, he inquired, ‘Were you at work today, Rysio?’
‘Yes, Dad, I was.’
‘What time did you have to be there?’
‘At eight, Dad, eight o’clock,’ lied his son, to avoid a pointless argument.
Another time, Józef Kapuściński waxed indignant when a female friend of his son and daughter-in-law mentioned that her double surname consisted of her maiden name combined with her husband’s. ‘Where is your respect for your husband?’ he bristled.
As Kapuściński’s sister told me, to the end of his days their father, who died in 1977, never fully understoond what Rysiek did or who he was.
3
War
I am seven years