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, Where’s your husband? Every five minutes Rysiek runs into the bathroom – he must have understood what was happening better than I did, and was more afraid; I was six and he was seven. Finally, perhaps out of spite at not finding my father there, the NKVD men stick their bayonets through a reproduction of Matejko’s painting Batory at the Battle of Pskov, which is hanging on the wall. They leave Mama in peace. Next day we discover that my father was in Pińsk that night, because he and Olek missed the train. Luckily he spent the night at his friend’s place.’
Several of them burst in, Red Army men and civilians, they barge in nervously and with such lightning speed, as if enraged wolves were chasing them. Rifles immediately leveled at us. A great fear: What if they fire? And what if they kill? . . . And to Mother: Muz kuda? (Where’s your husband?) And Mother, pale as a sheet, spreads her trembling arms and says that she doesn’t know . . . What are they searching for? They say that it’s weapons. But what kind of weapons could we have? My toy gun, which I used to fight the Indians with? . . . They want to take Mother away. Why, as a punishment?
[O]ne of the Red Army men, probably the eldest, probably the commander, hesitates for a moment, then puts on his cap, fastens the holster of his pistol, and says to his people: ‘Pashli!’ (‘Let’s go!’)6
‘For the next few nights we didn’t sleep – we were waiting for the NKVD to come back again.
‘Deportations of entire families began. That fate befell the family of my friend from next door, Sabina, whose father was a policeman. At five in the morning a wagon full of soldiers drove up to their house. The soldiers loaded their things onto the wagon, and allowed Sabina’s mother to cook a little buckwheat for the journey. I heard the noise and asked Mama if I could go to their place. Mama probably didn’t realize the danger I was in, and said yes.
‘The train they were using to deport them consisted of at least a dozen coaches, and loading them with people took several days. With our nanny Masia, Rysiek and I managed to smuggle in cooked buckwheat several times. It was winter and terribly cold, about thirty degrees below. Before the train set off, Sabina’s younger sister froze to death.’
In school, during breaks, or when we are returning home in a group, the talk is of deportations. There is now no subject more interesting.7
‘I remember that the whole time people talked about food, that something had to be obtained, or when would something be brought. One night it was my turn, and I had to stand in a queue for broken eggs. People pushed me out of the crowd, I didn’t get anything, and on top of that I broke the clay pot.’
Once, hungry and desperate, we approached the soldiers guarding the entrance to the barracks. Tovarishch, said Hubert, day pokushat, and mimed putting a piece of bread into his mouth . . . Finally one of the sentries reached into his pocket and instead of bread pulled out a little linen sack and handed it to us without a word. Inside were dark brown, almost black, finely chopped stems of tobacco leaves. The Red Army man also gave us a piece of newspaper, showed us how to twist it into a cone and pour into it the damp, foul-smelling tobacco gruel . . .
We began to smoke. The smoke scratched our throats and stung our eyes. The world started to swirl, rock, and was turned upside down. I vomited, and my skull was splitting from pain. But the all-consuming, gnawing sensation of hunger eased, weakened.8
‘Our Mama was lovely, we were never spanked, but just one time when she came back from the broken egg queue she hit us. Maybe she was feeling
