‘By the time he came home, it was night. We hadn’t slept a wink; we were terrified. That night my parents made the decision to run away. In the morning our father went to work in Sieraków, but didn’t come back – afterwards he went straight to Warsaw. He spent the next few nights in various places, staying with friends. Every night he had a problem, because he had to organize a different place to stay.’
At night the partisans come . . . One time they came, as usual, at night. It was autumn and it was raining. They talked to my mother about something in a whisper (I hadn’t seen my father for a month and I would not see him until the end of the war, as he was in hiding). We had to get dressed quickly and leave: there was a round-up in the district, they were transporting whole villages to the camps. We escaped to Warsaw, to a designated safe house. It was the first time I had been in the big city, the first time I ever saw a tram, high multi-story tenements, and rows of big shops.10
‘Rysiek, Mama and I spent several months living with a friend of my parents from Warsaw, Jadwiga Skupiewska. My father occasionally dropped in for the night, but he was not usually there. Where exactly the flat was, I don’t know; I remember a tenement with a central well. We weren’t allowed to go up to the windows, because staying with someone without being registered was strictly forbidden. So both we and the friends who gave us shelter were taking a risk.’
We were living in Warsaw then [as the winter of 1942 approached], on Krochmalna Street, near the gate to the ghetto, in the apartment of the Skupiewskis. Mr Skupiewski had a little cottage industry making bars of green bathroom soap. ‘I will give you some bars on consignment,’ he said. ‘When you sell four hundred, you will have enough for your shoes, and you can pay me back after the war.’ People then still believed that the war would end soon. He advised me to work along the route of the Warsaw–Otwock railway line, frequented by holiday travellers; vacationers will want to pamper themselves a little, he counselled, by buying a bar of soap. I listened to him. I was ten years old, and I cried half the tears of a lifetime then, because in fact no one wanted to buy the little soaps. In a whole day of walking I would sell none – or maybe a single bar. Once I sold three and returned home bright red with happiness.
After pressing the buzzer I would start to pray fervently: God, please have them buy something, have them buy at least one! I was actually engaged in a form of begging, trying to arouse pity. I would enter an apartment and say: ‘Please, madam, buy a soap from me. It costs only one zloty, winter is coming and I have no shoes.’ This worked sometimes, but not always, because there were many other children also trying to get over somehow – by stealing something, swindling someone, trafficking in this or that.
Cold autumn weather arrived, the cold nipped at the soles of my feet, and because of the pain I had to stop selling. I had three hundred zloty, but Mr Skupiewski generously threw in another hundred. I went with my mother to buy the shoes. If one wrapped one’s leg with a piece of flannel and tied newspaper on top of that, one could wear them even in the worst frosts of winter.11
‘We moved to Świder, outside Warsaw, on the other side of the Vistula [River]. It was a house with four flats, and we occupied one of them. Rysiek and I went to school in Otwock, seven kilometres one way, on an almost empty stomach; in the morning we barely drank a mug of chicory coffee. At school our dinner snack was a bowl of hot soup. After coming home and doing our homework, Mama usually said: “Children, go to bed, there won’t be any supper today”. So it went on almost until the war ended.
‘Our father was then working as a tax collector in Karczew – about a dozen or more kilometres from Świder – under a false name. He visited us once a week and sometimes brought a bit of sausage. These were the presents people with no money had given him to buy themselves off; they had asked him to come back some time later for their dues.
‘Then our father tried to work as a handyman. He advertised that he could solder pots, for instance, but no one wanted to employ him. People had no money, or even food to pay him for the work. My father sewed me dresses and made us shoes.’
Throughout the war my big dream was about shoes. To have shoes. But how could I get them? What could I do to have some shoes? . . . A strong shoe was a symbol of prestige and power, a symbol of command; a wretched, worn-out shoe was a sign of humiliation, the stigma of a man stripped of all dignity and condemned to an inhuman existence. To have strong shoes meant to be strong, or even simply to be.12
‘Other memories? I remember the tragic story of a Jewish woman who was hiding in one of the four flats in our house. She gave me maths coaching. I don’t think she taught Rysiek, because he didn’t have any problem with maths. We used to share our soup with her. She had a beautiful fur coat and a woman she knew wanted to . . . get it from her? Buy it? The Jewish woman refused. One day she went to see that other woman, wearing the fur, and never came back. Did the other woman betray her for the fur? That was what was said afterwards . . .
‘The Warsaw Uprising meant little bits of burned paper blowing our way from Warsaw, and the death of our uncle in the fighting.
‘The Soviets were getting nearer, and the Germans were taking all boys over the age of sixteen to dig trenches. Those taken away for this work never came back . . . That fate befell Janek, whose own father, our janitor, bundled him off because he himself was afraid to go. Thank God, Rysiek was barely twelve, and didn’t look too solid, so they left him alone.
‘We were living near the front line and we could hear the noises of fighting. We often went down to the cellar, which served as our shelter. Everyone prayed that no bomb would hit the house, and God heard us . . .
‘At that time Rysiek was very religious; he would stay like that to the end of the war, and perhaps a year or two after it as well. In Izabelin he also served at mass as an altar boy. One time I noticed a pool of saliva by our bed. “That’s so I’ll be on an empty stomach for Holy Communion,” he explained to me very earnestly.’
In 1944 I became an altar boy. My priest was the chaplain for a field hospital. There were rows of camouflaged tents hidden in a pine forest on the left bank of the Vistula. During the Warsaw Uprising, before the January offensive was launched, there was feverish, exhausting activity here. Ambulance cars kept rushing in from the front, which roared and smoked nearby. They brought the wounded, often semi-conscious, hurriedly and chaotically piled one on top of another, as if they were sacks of corn (but sacks dripping with blood). The orderlies, themselves only half alive from exhaustion by now, fetched out the wounded and laid them on the grass, then took a rubber hose and doused them in a strong jet of cold water. Any of the wounded who started to show signs of life were carried into the tent housing an operating theatre (on the ground outside the tent, every day there lay a fresh pile of amputated arms and legs), but anyone who wasn’t moving anymore was taken to a large grave situated at the rear of the hospital. It was there, over the never-ending grave, that I stood for hours next to the priest, holding the breviary and the stoup for him, repeating the prayer for the dead after him. To each person killed in action we said: Amen, dozens of times a day, Amen, in a hurry, because somewhere nearby, beyond the forest, the machine of death was working away relentlessly. Until finally one day it was silent and empty – the ambulances stopped coming and the tents were gone (the hospital went west), and the crosses were left in the forest.13
According to one hypothesis about the ‘psychological inheritance of war’, war has created the conviction that those who stick their necks out – the brave ones – are the first to come to grief.
In notes from a conversation I had with Wiktor Osiatyński, one of Kapuściński’s closest friends, I see that he echoes this thought: ‘The brave children in war were killed, the less brave had a better chance of surviving. It’s that simple. The experience of war, the sight of death and suffering, the poverty, hunger and terror – all this changes a person’s attitude for ever, his approach to life.’
In