for Sztandar Młodych in 1950, nor is it of any significance. Someone must have taken notice of the young poet, who has just published several poems in Odrodzenie and Dziś i Jutro (‘I owe the fact that I became a journalist to poetry – not the best, but it was mine,’ he would say years later). The fledgling poet belongs to the Youth Circle attached to the Polish Writers’ Union, and there he meets Woroszylski.
Sztandar Młodych, the newspaper for young communists in the ZMP, is produced by people of various temperaments and, above all, various experiences in life. One has been through exile in Siberia, another has fought in the Warsaw Uprising, another has survived the Holocaust. ‘We were ready to move mountains, climb to the peaks, often demolishing things along the way that you weren’t supposed to demolish,’ one veteran of the paper will recall.8
Their later fortunes will vary. One will remain faithful to socialism to the end; another will be a famous figure in the opposition. One will take part in the anti-Semitic witch-hunt of 1968; another will be its target. And one will end up as the world’s most famous Polish reporter.
To the offer to work for the newspaper, the high school poet Kapuściński replies: ‘First let me pass my high school graduation exams.’
Straight after these exams, in 1950, he turns up at the Sztandar Młodych editorial office, which occupies three floors of a tenement house on Wilcza Street in the centre of Warsaw. There are stacks of paper, lots of cigarette smoke, some lively minds and interesting discussions. The young poet finds the atmosphere of the place thrilling. At once, his pieces start to appear regularly in the newspaper. He reviews books and theatre, writes poems, and is a fully involved reporter and commentator – a participant in the ZMP revolution.
On 12 August, there appears a poem entitled ‘Our Days’ (an extract from a long poem called ‘The Road Leads Forward’):
And whenever
in statistics you see
the picture of days to come,
whenever
through hard work and ambition
you pour the concrete of socialism
whenever
your heart starts beating impatiently
like the piston in a machine
at once you are
a worker of victories
and a poet of powerful plans.9
An article dated 31 August about a socialist labour competition includes the following passage:
‘Yes, Comrades, more can be produced,’ says worker Czesław Naziębło, ‘but only once our norms are changed. Right now they are still old and unsuitable, and prevent us from raising our productivity’ . . . ‘I believe that by breaking the old, unsuitable norms we will build the foundations of socialism in People’s Poland faster’.10
And on 18 November there is a poem called ‘Second Defenders of Peace Congress’:
Let us ignite in our hearts
the flame of our will
The arm of Peace
flexes
more forcefully.
We –
stronger by a billion hands,
mightier
by force of Stalin’s mind.11
At a private party in the 1970s, as often happens over a glass of vodka, some Poles are chatting the night away. Wiktor Osiatyński is teasing Kapuściński:
‘How could you write those things in the 1950s? How could you support all that? After all, it was a repressive system, people were in prison.’
‘We didn’t know anything about the prisons.’
‘What didn’t you know? I’m twelve years younger than you and I knew about them in primary school.’
‘What did you know?’
‘That some of my friends’ fathers were in prison. How could you not have known?’
‘Because there was no one like that in my environment. “Class enemies” and their children weren’t admitted to college in those days.’
Maybe that’s true, says Osiatyński, but on the other hand he’d have had to be a moron not to know.
Among Kapuściński’s acquaintances in the 1950s, a classmate from Staszic High School, Teresa Lechowska, was sent to prison for political reasons. At the time she was a student at Warsaw University and a member of the ZMP. She was arrested in 1953 on a charge of telling political jokes and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for, as the verdict stated, ‘disseminating false information about economic and political relations within Poland and the friendly relationship between Poland and the USSR, and information heard on radio broadcasts by imperialist states capable of causing harm to the interests of the Polish People’s Republic’. She served a year, first in the Mostowski Palace (militia headquarters), then with female convicts sentenced for common crimes at a penal institution in Warsaw’s Gęsiówka Prison.
‘They had a thick file on me – I was denounced by a close female friend,’ says Lechowska. ‘There were jokes about Soviet science, for instance. Ivan Michurin was experimenting with genetic hybrids, and one of the jokes went: “Why is it a good idea to cross an apple tree with a dog? Because it waters itself, and if anyone tries to steal the apples, it barks.” You can understand what a threat that was to the Polish–Soviet alliance and the interests of People’s Poland,’ says Lechowska ironically.
She remembers Kapuściński from high school and university as an ardent idealist. ‘He wasn’t some sort of awful swine – he just believed in it, that’s all.’
‘Did you ever see each other at college?’
‘We bumped into each other from time to time. The university wasn’t as big as it is now, and old friends from high school knew about each other, where they were and what they were doing.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know about your arrest and sentence?’
‘That’s pretty much out of the question. When I came out of prison, I was told that at ZMP and Party meetings at the university I was pointed out as an example of a concealed “class enemy” who had cunningly wormed her way into college. He might not have remembered someone else’s case, but I was one of his classmates and we did see each other sometimes. He must have known.’
Many years later, the only time he will ever do so in such an open way, Kapuściński will admit:
One of the basic features of a totalitarian system is to block information right from the level of the individual: people keep quiet, they see and they know, but they keep quiet. A father is afraid to tell his son, a husband is afraid to tell his wife. This silence is either demanded of them, or they choose it themselves as a survival strategy.12
When he mentioned silence, did he have his classmate
