Author: Tatiana Chwagina, Pinsk. Source: Echa Polesia / polesie.org. Translated by the editorial staff.

Pre-war Pinsk appeared more than once in the memory of Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007), who was born into a family of teachers in the city on the Pina river and spent his childhood there. He is a legend of world journalism: over the course of his career he visited more than a hundred countries, witnessed countless coups d’état, revolutions, civil wars, and social catastrophes, and was imprisoned forty times. His creative legacy comprises 26 books, poetry collections, essays, and photo-reportages. He received ten literary and journalistic awards; in 1995 he was named “the best journalist of the twentieth century” and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yet even after travelling half the world, Kapuściński always remembered his small homeland — Pinsk and the Polesie region. He never ceased to profess his love for the city of his childhood, finding for it words of particular warmth, straight from the heart: “Our small town, green and sultry in summer, brown and gleaming like amber in the autumn sunlight…”

The distinctive Polesie landscape, fixed in his childhood memory, was for the future classic a source of creative inspiration throughout his many foreign postings: “I come from Pinsk, from Polesie. One might say from the provinces of Europe. Perhaps that is why I like to be in Third World countries… They remind me of my childhood… I always sought my home — in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America…”

Kapuściński dreamed of writing a book about Pinsk and spent years gathering material, but that dream was never to be fulfilled. Yet in his book Imperium there are passages that paint a picture of Pinsk at the turning of epochs, when the realities of the old life recede and are suddenly replaced by new ones.

In September 1939 Ryszard entered the first class of a Soviet school housed in the same building as the Polish school where his father, Józef Kapuściński, had previously taught woodwork. During lessons, pupils and teachers became unwitting witnesses to the shelling of the Church of St Stanislaus, which stood near the school on the Main Square:

“Sometimes a cannon shot interrupts the lesson. It is heard close by — unexpected, loud; the window panes and walls shake, and the teacher looks through the window with fear and embarrassment. When silence falls after the shot, we return to reading our thick book, but when we hear the screech of metal, the cracking of walls, the sound of falling stones, the class comes alive. Agitated voices — they hit the target. And the moment the bell rings, we run to the square to see what has happened.

Our small two-storey school stands here, near the square called 3rd of May Square. It is on this very square that the large church stands… the largest in the city. You have to raise your head high to see where the church ends and the sky begins. It is at this place that the cannon fires, trying to bring down the tower… Our neighbour told my mother that one day, when the dust had settled, she had seen Saint Andrew Bobola on top of the destroyed tower.”

The next chain of events to affect the writer was the disappearance from his school of many pupils and teachers: the deportations had begun. The Kapuściński family was also threatened. But children are children. Having queued all night for sweets and received in place of them a tin box — one per person — Ryszard and his friends ran to the city park, where a broken carousel had been left behind after the circus departed: no engine, just a single seat.

“The park is empty and quiet, and we run to the carousel and begin to spin it. It starts moving, it squeaks. I jumped into the seat and fastened myself with the chain… the carousel races, I feel the cold wind that nips and beats my face… wind on whose wings I rise like a pilot, like a bird, like a cloud.”

After the Kapuściński family left Pinsk, he returned to his home city for the first time with great excitement in 1979: “I travel all day by bus from Minsk to my home town of Pinsk. The same landscape from morning to evening, as if I had stood still. Only somewhere a shallow, winding channel of the Neman, somewhere a straight line of the Ogiński Canal. At noon I went to church. After the service, as the people were leaving, I went up and asked whether anyone remembered my parents, who had taught here at the school, and I said my name. It turned out that the people coming out of Mass had been my mother’s and father’s pupils, now fifty years older. I returned to the home of my childhood…”

For a long time the work of this world-renowned compatriot — “the Herodotus of Polesie,” as he came to be called after the publication of Travels with Herodotus — was unknown to Belarusian readers, and to this day translations of Kapuściński’s work into Belarusian and Russian are unfortunately few. In 2009 Imperium was translated into Belarusian and published in Minsk. Not only the author’s text but also the afterword written by Swedish Slavicist and translator Anders Bodegård is of extraordinary interest. Bodegård not only translated Kapuściński’s works into Swedish but also became his companion on one of his journeys to his small homeland. He described their shared arrival in Pinsk in detail:

“We drive across a boundless plain; the horizon is visible as if at sea, and yet they say the world is overpopulated… — Ryszard remarks. — A calm, quiet landscape; here and there storks walk across the fields, herds of cattle graze, and black birds beat their wings…”

On arrival, Kapuściński and his companions checked into the Hotel Prypyat, went to the nearest bank, and set out on a walk through the city, paying their respects to every building worthy of attention: the Butrymowicz Palace, the former Gregorowicz restaurant, the cathedral, the old market with its boat-shaped bazaar, and the Jesuit monastery. Anders Bodegård writes:

“We all go out into the city with a sense of joyful anticipation — walking along Lenin Street (formerly Kościuszko Street), near the hotel stands the Butrymowicz Palace, built for a Polish senator in the eighteenth century, a former bishop’s residence… Once there was a park in front of the palace stretching all the way to the river; now the view is blocked by courtyards and other absurd things.

Ryszard stops in front of a white building with a rounded corner. This was the best restaurant and confectionery in the city — ‘Gregorowicz.’ Ryszard’s mother used to bring the children here for ice cream. The next stop on the same street — a walled Catholic cathedral, the former Franciscan church… services are held there. Nearby is the school that Ryszard attended in the autumn of 1939 … the same school where artillery salvoes could be heard as the towers of the great Jesuit church on 3rd of May Square were being shelled.

… Now we are beyond the bridge, at the place where before the war, when the riverbank was not drained and sometimes flooded, there was a large market. Peasants would arrive in narrow boats to sell fish, honey, hides, timber… nothing remains. Above — the former Jesuit monastery, which even without the demolished church dominates the river landscape. All of it was built in 1631 by Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł, Chancellor of Lithuania… The monastery building was recently converted into a City Museum; they are now to open an ethnographic exhibition devoted to Polesie there…”

The Kapuściński family had no home of their own in Pinsk and moved from flat to flat several times. To this day two houses survive — on Suvorov Street (formerly Błotna Street) and at the corner of Soviet Street (formerly Bernardine Street) and Gogol Street (formerly Teodor Street). The houses on Wesoła and Kolejowa Streets are gone. The picture that greeted the writer at 43 Suvorov Street — where he had lived with his family for several years — was disheartening: a ruin earmarked for demolition. Fortunately, the historic house was preserved; it now bears a commemorative plaque honouring the famous writer who brought renown to both Polish literature and his small homeland.

Anyone born or having spent time in Pinsk knows that without a journey on the water, no complete picture of the capital of Polesie can be formed.

Kapuściński remembered well that the Pinsk of his childhood was a significant naval base with a port and shipyard. Standing on the bridge with his companions, he admired the supports of the old bridge built in 1930, which had connected Pinsk with Zarzecze on the right bank beyond the Pina.

“The Germans blew up the bridge, but after the war it was rebuilt; in 1970 they demolished it and built a new one. Our friend and guide Aleksei (Dubrowski) ordered a motorboat for us. Our boat was the only one with an engine, but the river was full of rowers in kayaks and ordinary punts… As we sit in the motorboat, Ryszard says: ‘Do you hear how quiet it is?’ The water does not move, as if there were no current. There is no difference in elevation here, no mountains, everything is flat. Nothing happens here — look at the surface of the water. From Pinsk, with its little wooden houses, one could sail anywhere in the world…”

Making their way to the old cemetery where his grandmother is buried, Kapuściński leads his companions along old streets he remembers from a distant childhood: “Pinsk could have been a magnificent city, a cornucopia. There are still old wooden houses standing on their plots of land, drowning in lush greenery. The former Grodzka Street, now Komsomolska, is still unpaved. Puddles glisten. Here in the gardens everything grows to bursting: fruit, vegetables, and potatoes, potatoes… Luxury — but something is missing. Where are the roses, marigolds, nasturtiums?”

During a visit to the City Museum, Kapuściński — as a world-famous local — was asked to say a few words: “I am attached to Pinsk… Coming here is a great experience… My grandmother lies in the local cemetery. On my travels around the world I often meet people from Pinsk, from Polesie.”

“Pinsk, Polesie, and the rest of the world are closely bound together” — with these words the writer concluded his address.

Extract from an interview with Ryszard Kapuściński (by Barbara N. Łopieńska)

How will you manage a book about your own childhood in Pinsk?

— Childhood images imprint themselves on the memory and, though they are covered by others, they persist. And when the right circumstances arise, they are found at once. For thirty-five years I could not go to Pinsk. I could go to Moscow, to Samarkand, to Tashkent, but I could not go to the place of my birth. They let me in only in the mid-1970s. When I stood on Kościuszko Street, I immediately knew where I was, because my mother used to take me there for ice cream at the Gregorowicz restaurant. Today Kościuszko Street is called Lenin Street, but I immediately knew where 3rd of May Square was, where Bernardine Street was. After that I could go to Pinsk whenever I had time.

Once — as I described in Imperium — I arrived and went to church. When the people were leaving, I said my name, and several elderly women came up to me. None of them knew me, but they remembered my parents. Then I reconstructed for myself a little of my pre-war Pinsk. Even so, from childhood I remember impressions more than facts.

Your parents taught at a primary school in Pinsk.

— My mother came from Bochnia, my father from the Kielce region. Polesie was territory recovered by Poland after the First World War, and the Polish state wanted to populate it, to introduce Polish education — but no one wanted to go there. My parents were told that if they wanted work they should go there and complete a teacher training college. So I was born a child of settlers. In the 1930s thirty-two thousand people lived in Pinsk, including the highest percentage of Jewish population in the world, but Pinsk was essentially an international small town, like all the Borderland cities. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians.

In little Pinsk there were five cemeteries, and from those cemeteries one can understand what Pinsk was. A Roman Catholic cemetery, an Orthodox one, two Jewish cemeteries — because the Jews of Pinsk were divided into two groupings: the Jews of Pinsk and the Jews of Karolin. Already in the 1920s emigration to Palestine was being organised, and the first generation of Jews in Israel came from Polesie. The first president of Israel was from Pinsk. During the war not a single house in Pinsk was destroyed, but the population was decimated. The Poles were deported, shot, or emigrated; the Jews were murdered. The Pinsk ghetto was the second ghetto after the Ukrainian Babi Yar to be completely liquidated. In a city of thirty-two thousand, twenty-six thousand Jews were murdered.

I saw on the Internet a photograph of the house where you were born. It is beautiful.

— I certainly lived there from infancy. Now three houses in Pinsk dispute which one I was born in. When the USSR collapsed they wanted to demolish the house, but the Polish community in Belarus raised an outcry, the demolition was halted, and later it was renovated and given a plaque reading: Zdies proszło dziectwo Kapuscinskowo — “Kapuściński’s childhood passed here.”

And how did it pass?

— Happily, until the war broke out. I attended primary school number five, on Kościuszko Street number eight, and after school I hung onto the backs of cabs.

What was the atmosphere in your family home in the Borderlands? A patriotic bastion of Polishness?

— I don’t know, I don’t remember. I left Pinsk in 1940. The NKVD used to come to us and it was clear we were destined for deportation. My mother took my sister and me and we fled by cart, then by train to Lwów, and from there to Przemyśl. My father, a reserve officer, escaped from a transport to Katyn. When we left Pinsk I rode by train for the first time — and then for the first time in my life, when I was nine years old, I saw a tram and a city. I saw Warsaw in 1940. And the symbol of a big city for me was the tram. A train in the city. We spent the occupation in the countryside and returned to Warsaw in 1945, but by then, in destroyed Warsaw, there were no more trams. Perhaps that was when my childhood ended.

But what soaked into the young vessel?

— I was shaped by everything that shapes a so-called Borderlands person. The Borderlands person is everywhere and always an intercultural person — a person “in between.” Someone who learns from childhood, from playing in the courtyard, that people are different, and that otherness is simply a human characteristic. Someone who grows up among different languages and behaviours. In Pinsk one child brought a herring from home, another a meat pie, a third a piece of a cutlet. We all ate it together, and that was the first common table. To be of the Borderlands means openness toward other cultures — and even more than that: Borderlands people do not treat other cultures as foreign, but as part of their own.

Is that why you travel the world — because you are a Borderlands person?

— Indeed, I have never written anything about Europe. I remember my Pinsk as a very good place. It was a small town of friendly people and friendly streets. Until the war broke out I witnessed no conflict there. A place without ostentation, without pretension — a place of modest, simple people. My parents as teachers were such people too. Perhaps that is why I always felt at home afterwards in the so-called Third World, where people are characterised not by wealth but by hospitality, not by ostentation but by cooperation.

People in Polesie lived on a modest human scale, and Pinsk was like the Aristotelian definition of a city where everyone knows everyone else at least by sight. That is what distinguished the Borderland cities, which created a climate of friendship. The memory of Pinsk before the war is the memory of a welcoming place. That is what I seek throughout the world.

source: kapuscinski.info