Author: Małgorzata Wyrzykowska, source: PAP

Many places in Pinsk, Belarus, still carry memories of Ryszard Kapuściński’s childhood — he was born here in 1932 — but the old Pinsk is slowly fading from memory. Some buildings associated with the writer are falling into ruin; others have disappeared entirely.

“I think this is the house where Kapuściński’s parents, Maria and Józef, met. It housed the district administrative office, and I found a record in the archives showing that both of them were delegates to a teachers’ congress held here,” says archivist Edward Żłobin, who had the opportunity to speak with the writer during his visit to Pinsk in the 1990s. The grey, unremarkable building stands on Sovyetskaya Street, formerly known as Bernardine Street.

A little further along the same street stands the Church of St Barbara, which in Kapuściński’s time was a Bernardine Catholic church dedicated to St Michael the Archangel, named in honour of its founder Michał Wiśniowiecki. Beside it stands a neglected two-storey monastery building. In Kapuściński’s day it served as a hospital.

“This is where Ryszard was born,” says Żłobin. At that time roughly 70–75 per cent of Pinsk’s then-39,000 inhabitants were Jewish; among the remaining population, Poles were the dominant group. Today, in a Pinsk of 130,000 people, the president of the local Union of Poles in Belarus, Lila Murawiejko, estimates the Polish community at around 2,000; there are approximately 1,000 Jews.

“Poles were deported to Siberia, shot, and many left in the post-war repatriation,” says Krystyna Kalinowska, long-serving president of the Pinsk branch of the Union of Poles in Belarus. “Jews were sent to ghettos — there were three of them in Pinsk — and then to the camps.”

In the first months after his birth, Kapuściński lived in a house on Teodorovskaya Street, now Gogol Street. The wooden building with a sloping roof — typical of most Belarusian small towns and villages — looks different today, having been faced with brick on the outside. The Kapuścińskis moved several times within Pinsk, as they owned no house of their own and rented.

Right next door to the Teodorovskaya house lived Ryszard Kapuściński’s first nanny, Anna Werbanowicz. “She came from an interesting family — her father moved in revolutionary circles and collaborated with Felix Dzerzhinsky,” says Żłobin.

The best-known building in Pinsk associated with Kapuściński stands on Suvorov Street, formerly Błotna Street. The writer lived there until 1939. Today the handsome two-storey house is surrounded by apartment blocks, among which it appears like a relic of another era. In Kapuściński’s time Błotna Street was still unpaved, as was most of Pinsk.

On the street-facing wall hangs a commemorative plaque, unveiled in 2007, bearing a likeness of Kapuściński, whose 5th anniversary of death falls on 23 January. The first-floor flat once occupied by his family has been home for about ten years to the Bezinov family. Ivan, who has just returned from hunting, proudly poses before the plaque at the request of local journalists, but admits he has read none of Kapuściński’s books — nor have his wife and two teenage children.

The spacious upper-floor flat has a balcony where Kapuściński used to stand as a child. A photograph survives of two-year-old Ryś on that balcony, confirming that the balustrade has remained unchanged since his time. The view of the surroundings, however, is different now. Only the small house visible at the far end of the crossroads in the old photograph has survived.

“When the Soviets arrived they nationalised the house on Błotna Street, and the Kapuścińskis were forced to find somewhere else to live. They moved to Kolejowa Street, now Zheleznodorozhnaya Street,” says Żłobin. They stayed there for about six weeks in 1939. The building no longer exists — the entire street burned down in 1944 — but the old railway tracks still run along the former Kolejowa Street. Once used by the Brest–Homel narrow-gauge line, they are occasionally used for freight transport today.

Also gone is the last house in which Kapuściński lived in Pinsk, on Wesołowa Street. A school now stands on that spot.

The former Primary School No. 5 on Lenin Street (formerly Kościuszko Street), which Kapuściński attended from 1938 and where his father taught singing and handicrafts, makes a sad sight today. The historic building, in front of which the future writer used to play football, stares out through empty windowframes and crumbling plaster.

“It was privatised. The owner is obliged to maintain the historic appearance of the building. He even told me he wanted to set up an exhibition about Kapuściński in one of the rooms — I thought it was an excellent idea. But there is no money, so nothing happens here,” says local journalist Inna Dziemid.

The Kapuściński family left Pinsk at the beginning of the Second World War, but Ryszard Kapuściński’s maternal grandmother is buried in the local cemetery. The gravestone reads: “Marja née Szlamek Bobka, died 13 April 1928. She lived 38 years.”

The grave has been tended for many years by Helena Szołomicka, 84, president of the Siberian Deportees’ Association, whose parents rest nearby. “I knew Ryszard’s mother, so they feel like family to me,” she says. “When Ryszard Kapuściński learned that someone was looking after that grave, he had tears in his eyes,” adds Żłobin.

The cemetery was largely desecrated during the communist period. “On the left is the Catholic section, where a church once stood, and on the right the Orthodox section, where a church also stood. But both were burnt down — the Catholic one in the late 1960s, the Orthodox one in the early 1970s,” recounts Żłobin.

“Who did it? The Pioneers, of course. I know the man who set fire to the Orthodox church. He is retired now. He goes to church and prays for forgiveness for his sins.”

One of the characteristic places in Pinsk that has vanished entirely is the water market. It was held in the town centre every weekend, since before the war the Pina River running through the town was the most reliable communication route for people from surrounding villages who came to sell their goods. Today the Pina embankment is deserted at weekends.

“Very little has been preserved in this city at all,” says Żłobin sadly.

From Pinsk, Małgorzata Wyrzykowska

Source: PAP

See also: Robert Nowacki’s account of his 2002 visit to Kapuściński’s Pinsk.

source: kapuscinski.info