It is night, and I want to sleep, but I’m not allowed to sleep, we have to go, we have to escape. Where to, I do not know, but I understand that escape has become an absolute necessity, a new form of life, because everyone is escaping; all the highways, roads and even the field tracks are full of wagons, carts and bicycles, full of bundles, cases, bags and buckets, full of terrified people wandering helplessly. Some are escaping to the east, others to the west . . .
We pass battlefields strewn with abandoned equipment, bombed-out railway stations, and cars turned on their sides. There is a smell of gunpowder, a smell of burning, and a smell of rotting meat. Everywhere we come upon the dead bodies of horses. A horse – a large, defenceless animal – doesn’t know how to hide; during a bomb attack it stands still, waiting for death. At every step there are dead horses, either lying in the road, or in the ditch next to it, or somewhere further off in a field. They lie with their legs in the air, shaking their hooves at the world. I do not see any dead people anywhere, because they are buried quickly, just endless corpses of horses, black, bay, piebald, chestnut, as if it wasn’t a war between people, but horses.1
Fifty years later, on reading this description of the scene, the American author John Updike writes in a letter to Kapuściński that only now does he understand the significance of the figure of the horse in Picasso’s Guernica.
After days of wandering we are near Pińsk, and in the distance we can already see the town’s houses, the trees of its beautiful park, and the towers of its churches, when suddenly sailors materialize on the road right by the bridge. They have long rifles and sharp, barbed bayonets and, on their round caps, red stars . . . they don’t want to let us into town. They keep us at a distance – ‘Don’t move!’ they shout, and take aim with their rifles. My mother, as well as other women and children – for they have already rounded up a group of us – is crying and begging for mercy. ‘Plead for mercy,’ the mothers, beside themselves with fear, implore us, but what more can we, the children, do – we have already been kneeling on the road, sobbing and stretching out our arms, for a long time.
Shouting, crying, rifles and bayonets, the enraged faces of the sweaty and angry sailors, some sort of fury, something dreadful and incomprehensible, it is all there by the bridge over the river Pina, in this world that I enter at seven years of age.2
In Pińsk there is nothing to eat. Maria Kapuścińska stands in the window for hours, watching. In the neighbours’ windows Rysiek sees people gazing at the street in the same way as his mother. Are they waiting for something? But what?
Rysiek spends hours roaming the streets and courtyards with his friends. They play a few games, but in fact they’re hoping to find something to eat.
Sometimes the smell of soup comes wafting through a door. Whenever this happens, one of my friends, Waldek, thrusts his nose into the gap in the door and starts urgently, feverishly inhaling the smell, rubbing his stomach with relish, as if he were sitting at a table full of food, but moments later he loses heart and sinks into apathy again.3
He will constantly return to the admission that the war – as for everyone who lived through it – was a decisive experience; for the growing boy, the period which shaped his view of humanity and the world came between the ages of seven and thirteen.
Those who lived through the war will never be free of it. It has remained in them like a mental burden, like a painful growth that even as excellent a surgeon as time will never be able to remove. Listen to a gathering of people who lived through the war when they get together and sit down at table one evening. It doesn’t matter what they start to talk about. There may be a thousand topics, but there will be only one ending, and it will be remembering the war . . .
For a long time I thought this was the only world, that this is how it looks, and this is what life is like. That is understandable – the war years were the period of my childhood, then of my early adolescence, my first understanding, the birth of my consciousness. So it seemed to me that not peace, but war is the natural state, or even the only one, the only form of existence, that wandering, hunger and fear, air raids and fires, round-ups and executions, lies and screaming, contempt and hatred were the natural, eternal state of affairs, the meaning of life, the essence of existence.4
What do these words mean? That fear is a principle of the world and the most basic human emotion? That danger is another one? Instincts like these – maybe not yet thoughts, not so fully formulated – must have been aroused in the seven-, eight- or thirteen-year-old by ‘the natural state of war’.
Now, as I look through various texts by Kapuściński – whether spoken abroad, when he was already famous, or written – I find that the war continually recurs; if only as a brief memory, a reference, a starting or finishing point, it always finds room for itself. Somewhere he wrote that war reduces the world to black and white, to ‘the most primitive battle between two forces – good and evil’. How, then, do we emerge from it? How do we recover?
I’m trying to do some bookkeeping: what, where, when. As far as possible, I want to do it item by item. The only person who can help me with this is Barbara. In the course of our conversations I establish, unsurprisingly, that the siblings remembered certain events in the same or a similar way, and others in an entirely different way. Many Kapuściński never mentioned. Did he not remember them? Did he think them unimportant, or too traumatic?
I compare their accounts, even the ones about trivial events, and am often unable to determine which is closer to the truth – these are the truths of two children’s memories. Below I alternate Barbara’s story with fragments taken from Rysiek’s published accounts.
‘When war broke out, we were in the countryside near Rejowiec, which is not far from Chełm in southeastern Poland. We were on holiday there at our uncle’s place. I can’t remember much of the journey home. In Pińsk, which was under Soviet occupation, Rysiek went to school, and I was still too small.’
In school, starting in the first grade, we learn the Russian alphabet. We begin with the letter s. ‘What do you mean by s?’, someone asks from the back of the classroom. ‘It should begin with a!’ ‘Children,’ says the teacher (who is a Pole) in a despondent voice, ‘look at the cover of our book. What is the first letter on this cover? S!’ Petrus, who is Belorussian, can read the whole title: ‘Stalin, Voprosy Leninizma’ (Studies in Leninism). It is the only book from which we learn Russian, and our only copy of this book . . .
All the children will be members of the Pioneers! One day a car pulls into the schoolyard . . . Someone says that it’s the NKVD . . . The NKVD people brought us white shirts and red scarves. ‘On important holidays,’ says our teacher . . . ‘every child will come to school in this shirt and scarf ’.5
‘Soon people start talking about deportations to Siberia. The Polish teachers and policemen are going to be deported. Our father, who was a teacher and a reserve officer, decides to escape, which means illegally crossing the border into the General Government – the part of Poland under German occupation. He sets off at dusk, first to the house of his friend Olek Onichimowski, also a teacher, who lives near the railway station; they are going to escape together.
‘That same night the NKVD comes for my father. They are armed with rifles fitted with bayonets. They shout at Mama,