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 to the question ‘How did the war shape Kapuściński?’ I offer Hanna Krall’s short answer: ‘He was a child of the war, and like many people of his generation the war made him eager for life.’
When Imperium was published, readers from Pińsk corrected and sometimes challenged some details of Kapuściński’s account of their city under Soviet occupation. One wrote that only Russians, and not even all Russians, were accepted in the Pioneers’ organization; apparently Polish children could belong to the Pioneers as long as their parents immediately took out USSR citizenship. Another correction was that the Pioneers received the white shirts and red scarves from that organization, not from the NKVD at school.
Memory, especially a child’s memory, affected by knowledge gained years later, is always subjective. Inevitably it blurs the borders between hard facts and impressions, family stories and gossip. But can there be another truth which a person is capable of telling about himself?
Kapuściński may have got some details wrong. Perhaps his memory encoded the same events differently than did the memories of his Pińsk reviewers. In the CVs he attached to applications for college, and later to join the PZPR, Kapuściński wrote that he belonged to the Pioneers – a detail in his memoirs that has been challenged. By now, his membership is impossible to verify.
Yes, the question of whether Kapuściński embellished his own life story is legitimate. As I read, converse with Barbara, friends, and colleagues, compile facts and dates, and do the biographical bookkeeping, I come upon clues that make it impossible not to have doubts. As he told stories about his life, was he ‘writing’ yet another book? Is Ryszard Kapuściński – the hero of Ryszard Kapuściński’s books (and he is the hero of almost all his own books) – a real person? To what extent is he also a literary character? Did Kapuściński create his own legend? How? Why?
4
Legends 1: His Father and Katyń
‘My father, a reserve officer, escaped from a transport to Katyń.’
In the spring of 1940, on Stalin’s orders, the Soviet NKVD (People’s Commisariat for Internal Affairs – the secret police) murdered thousands of Polish officers at Katyń. They were soldiers who were taken prisoner at the beginning of the Second World War when the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland.
In Imperium, there is a section about the early stages of the Soviet occupation in Pińsk. Presenting his account in the manner of a child, Kapuściński describes his father’s return from the first conflict that occurred in 1939:
I see my father entering the room, but I barely recognize him. We had said good-bye in the summer. He was in an officer’s uniform; he had on tall boots, a yellow belt, and leather gloves. I walked down the street with him and listened with pride to how everything on him creaked and clattered. Now he stands before us in the clothes of a Polish peasant, thin, unshaven. He is wearing a cotton knee-length shirt tied with burlap string and straw shoes on his feet. From what my mother is saying, I understand that he fell into Soviet captivity and that he was being driven east. He says that he escaped when they were walking in a column through the forest, and in a village he exchanged his uniform with a peasant for the shirt and straw shoes.1
Kapuściński’s school friend, the writer and translator Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski, expresses his doubts about the father’s escape from Soviet captivity (not to mention his escape ‘from a transport to Katyń’). ‘Many writers have a tendency to self-create, to supplement their own life stories with made-up, or partly made-up, embellished events,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing sensational about that. Rysiek, as I remember him, liked to confabulate.’
In an interview not quite four years before his death, Kapuściński talks about his ‘father’s escape from a transport to Katyń’.2
I ask his sister whether she knows the details of Józef ’s escape from Soviet captivity. She is surprised by the question and says categorically that their father was never in Soviet captivity, and that Divine Providence was watching over them. So he didn’t escape from a transport to Katyń, I ask? No, he didn’t escape from a transport to Katyń, nor any of the camps for Polish soldiers and officers. Their father was never a prisoner, and if he was, she would certainly have known about it. He did come home dressed in civilian clothes when the fighting stopped, and shortly after that he and his friend Olek Onichimowski, who was also a teacher, got across into the General Government. He had to escape because, as a teacher, under Soviet occupation he was in danger of being deported to the East.
A letter from Kapuściński’s paternal uncle, Marian, which I find in the master’s study, confirms his sister’s version. A month before the outbreak of war, Marian Kapuściński began working at the forestry commission in Sobibór. In September 1939, before the Germans had reached Sobibór, Józef Kapuściński turned up at his workplace in army uniform. The forestry district manager, the uncle’s boss, gave him civilian clothing so that he wouldn’t be recognized as an officer and taken to a German Oflag (officers’ prison camp). Józef Kapuściński journeyed to Pińsk in civvies.
Why did Kapuściński add this martyrological feature to his father’s biography? The first thing that comes to mind is that in this way he settled some scores with part of his own life story, in which he had given his heart and mind to the idea of communism. Was a father who ‘escaped from a transport to Katyń’ meant to ‘counterbalance’ something? To deter attacks by those who, after the collapse of real socialism, tracked down examples of approval for that system and of co-operation with the secret services – examples from the lives