Kapuściński and Pinsk — The Hometown That Would Not Be Forgotten
Ryszard Kapuściński was born on 4 March 1932 in Pinsk — a city in the Polesie region, today within the borders of Belarus. It was one of his earliest memories and one of the last questions he kept returning to. All his life he said: “I always searched for my home. I searched for Pinsk.”
📖 See also: Biography of Kapuściński · Facts about Kapuściński
Pinsk — a borderland city
Pinsk lay at a crossroads of cultures. In the 1930s Poles, Jews (a substantial part of the population), Belarusians and Ukrainians lived there side by side. A multilingual, multi-confessional, many-layered city. For a child raised in such a space the Other — a person of another culture, another language, another faith — was not an abstraction but a neighbour.
Kapuściński understood only late how deeply this first lesson in diversity had shaped him as a reporter. He wrote about it in Travels with Herodotus: the capacity for curiosity toward the foreign, for suspending one’s own point of view — that is not a talent, it is an upbringing.
Pinsk lay in Polesie — a land of marshes, rivers and forests stretching between Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. In the Second Polish Republic it was the Polesie Voivodeship, one of the poorest and least developed regions of the country, yet extraordinarily rich in culture. Kapuściński grew up amid a poverty he would later recognise in Africa and Latin America. In The Shadow of the Sun and Imperium he repeatedly noted that the destitution of the Third World was not foreign to him — he knew it from childhood, from the Polesie poverty of the 1930s.
This biographical experience set him apart from Western correspondents. When he wrote about hunger, about mud, about the lack of electricity and running water, he did not look down — he looked as someone who came from such a place himself.
The flight — a first “reporter’s” experience
In 1941, when Germany attacked the USSR and the front drew near to Polesie, the Kapuściński family left Pinsk. The young Ryszard fled with his mother and sister — on foot, across fields and forests, heading west. His father was at war.
That journey — a child on a wartime road, watching ruins, refugees, violence and human solidarity — left a deep mark. Kapuściński repeatedly returned to it as a foundational experience: reporting without a notebook, observing without words, remembering without choosing.
In Imperium he describes his first encounter with Soviet power while still in Pinsk: the Red Army’s entry in 1939, the new school, the new language, the fear of the adults. These scenes — seen through the eyes of a small boy — are among the most often cited passages of his work. They show how early he came up against the mechanism he would describe for the rest of his life: how high politics breaks into the everyday lives of ordinary people.
After the war the borders were moved. Pinsk found itself outside Poland — in the Belarusian SSR, in the Soviet Union. The Kapuściński family settled in Poland within its new borders. For young Ryszard it meant that his hometown had suddenly become a foreign country, a place behind a border impassable for decades. The loss of Pinsk was at the same time the loss of an entire cultural formation of the Borderlands.
Pinsk in his work
Lapidarium IV — a return after years
In Lapidarium IV Kapuściński describes his return to Pinsk — a visit on 30 June 1997. He writes that Pinsk is for him “three different cities at once”: the city of childhood recorded in memory, the Soviet city he found after the war, and the contemporary city — Belarusian, post-Soviet, becoming something else.
This passage became one of the most frequently quoted in the context of Kapuściński and the memory of place.
Travels with Herodotus — Pinsk as a metaphor
In Travels with Herodotus the multiculturalism of childhood appears as the root of the reporter’s vocation. Herodotus — the first historian to set out into the field to describe foreign peoples — is close to Kapuściński precisely because he too grew up on a borderland.
“I always searched for my home — I searched for Pinsk”
This quote, repeated in various interviews, sums up something essential: Pinsk was for Kapuściński not only his birthplace but a symbol of a first world that had vanished. The flight of 1941, the erasure of the Jewish community by the Germans, the post-war redrawing of borders — the Pinsk of his childhood ceased to exist. The reporter searched for it for the rest of his life in other places and other people.
Pinsk today
Pinsk lies today in the Brest Region of Belarus, on the Pina and Pripyat rivers. The city has about 130,000 inhabitants. After the Second World War the pre-war multiculturalism of Polesie — Poles displaced, the Jewish community murdered — ceased to exist.
The memory of Kapuściński in Pinsk is present, though it is gradually fading. That process is described in the article Belarus — Kapuściński’s Pinsk Is Slowly Slipping into Oblivion.
Read more about Pinsk and Kapuściński’s childhood
- Pinsk — The Hometown — the city’s history and historical context
- At the Station in Brest — the eastern borderland in his work
📖 See also: Facts about Kapuściński · How many languages did he know?
source: kapuscinski.info