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 talking about brave and less brave children, Osiatyński is not directly referring to his friend, but rather suggesting a possible key. ‘I never judge anyone whose youth coincided with the war and then Stalinism,’ my notes read. ‘I don’t know how I would have got through that time myself, or how I would have behaved.’
Later in the conversation, Osiatyński says: ‘He wasn’t a man of great courage, though several times he managed to say no. For example, following the introduction of martial law on 13 December 1981, when he gave up his PZPR [Polish United Workers’ Party] membership card – that must have been hard for him. I have no reason to challenge his stories of how he was going to be shot several times when he was a correspondent in Africa and Latin America, or rather I have no solid proof to the contrary. But nor could I ever resist the impression that he created his courage in literature. He knew he was different.’
To have experienced the privations, suffering and danger of war has a paradoxical flip side: it facilitates adaptation to the tough conditions of work as a foreign correspondent during wars, revolutions and unrest on various continents, when there is nothing to eat and you sleep anywhere you can. The point is not that it was easier for Kapuściński than for other reporters, or that he suffered less, but that he probably had a different ‘internal limit’ of resilience, a greater capacity to adapt, perhaps also to cope with fear, than those journalists who had not had a taste of war in childhood and grew up in relative peace and prosperity.
‘Rysiek never openly admitted it, but he was fascinated by images of war. I feel exactly the same,’ says Mirosław Ikonowicz, a friend from the same generation. They met as students in the history faculty at Warsaw University and spent many years working for the same press agency. Like Kapuściński, Ikonowicz was a PAP correspondent during the civil war in Angola. ‘War, revolution, dangerous places were necessary to him for “life on the edge,” ’ he told me. ‘I would compare this need of his – and of mine as well – to the needs of people who go in for extreme sports. Though he used to say he wasn’t looking for extra adrenalin, I think this need lay deep inside him – we talked about it a number of times.’
Another note from my conversation with Ikonowicz reads, ‘Rysiek didn’t like being confronted.’ To what extent can his war experiences be involved in this dislike of confrontation? Is it that when it comes to conflict, a squabble or a clash, a person can get hit? And yet throughout his professional life he was eager to go to dangerous places.
I shall answer these questions later, and also return to the question of personal courage. I note in the margin: ‘Establish everything possible on Kapuściński’s several near-executions by firing squad’ – extreme confrontations which he described in books and interviews.
But in response
