landscape is far from idyllic:
This discrimination was strongly felt in Pinsk. Despite the fact that it was a Jewish city for the most part, the city’s mayor was a Pole and, until 1927, the city was run by an administrative body appointed by the Polish authorities. The city council included only two Jews and they, too, were appointed by the Polish authorities.8
In the 1930s, Polish nationalists are often heard proclaiming ‘each to one’s own for one’s own’, which serves as a form of incitement to boycott Jewish shops. This campaign, and the accompanying rise in anti-Semitism, does not bypass Pińsk. People talk about it at home, on the street, at work and in church.
Years later, the same Jewish historian will write,
Anti-Semitic students who came from outside the city plotted attacks against the Jews. However neither of these attempts succeeded. The Polish businesses could not compete with the Jewish ones and the Jewish youth knew how to silence the Polish hooligans and caused them to flee the city. 9
In interviews and conversations, Kapuściński idealized the land of his childhood, depicting Pińsk as a perfect, harmonious place, where tolerance reigned and people regarded mutual dissimilarity as a treasure. Yet in his notes for the book on Pińsk, that image becomes complicated, full of stains and flaws. Here, for instance, is an extract titled ‘Good Manners for Christian Children’:
[W]hen I look into the depths of time towards my childhood, the first thing I see is the dog catcher’s wagon coming down our bumpy road, Błotna Street, later called Perets Street and now Suvorov . . . when the dog catchers see a dog, they rush towards it and surround it, emitting wild shrieks, and then you hear the swish of a lasso and the terrified animal howling as they drag it away and throw it in a cage. Soon after, the wagon moves on.
Why these nasty, scruffy men are catching the poor dogs is something every Christian child will discover if he gets up to any mischief. Be good, he or she will then hear Mama or Grandma warn, or the dog catchers will take you away to make matzos! And so thanks to the constant presence of the dog catchers on the streets of our town, the Christian children are well brought up – not one of them wants to be eaten as an anonymous piece of brittle kosher flatbread.10
Are tales about Jews performing the ritual murder of Christian children so as to extract their blood and add it to their matzos – a monstrous myth, repeated in churches and Catholic homes, which for centuries was at the root of intolerance, pogroms and crimes against Jews – something little Rysio hears on the street, from neighbours, from his relatives?
His sister, Basia, a year younger, remembers stories of this kind. Here is one she told me: ‘An old Jew with a long beard once accosted me in the street. “Wait here,” he said, “I’ll go indoors and fetch you some sweets.” So I stand outside his house, waiting. A neighbour appears, and she says: “What are you doing here, Basia?” “I’m waiting for him,” I say, pointing at the Jew’s house. “He promised to bring me some sweets.” “Run away from here at once, child! He wants to kidnap you for his matzos!” ’
She then added, ‘In those days people used to say the Jews needed children’s blood for their rituals.’
In the summer of 1942, the army of the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union, taking Pińsk in the process. Eleven thousand of the city’s Jews were killed at once in two mass executions. The rest were driven into a ghetto, where a year later a resistance movement formed and a revolt occurred. A few of the Jews managed to escape and hide in the forest. Some joined partisan groups; others were finished off by the locals.
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
