Kapuściński as Catastrophist

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 115-117:

I turned to a reporter friend who writes about the Czech Republic to ask how and where to look, and whether such an account did actually exist. He helped me get in touch with Jaroslav Bouček, son of the late ‘commander’ of the Congolese expedition, and this led me to a radically different story from the one presented in The Soccer War.

It turned out that Bouček Jr had written an essay titled ‘In Deepest Congo’. In it, he compares Kapuściński’s account with his father’s, which he found in the National Archive in Prague, along with his Cairo diary, his letters and dispatches.

Jaroslav Bouček wonders if Kapuściński’s expressive depiction of the dangerous journey to Congo, compared with the ‘civilian’ mood of Bouček’s account, arose from the fact that it was the first time Kapuściński had ever found himself in the dramatic situation of civil war in an African country, and so he took the verbal threats addressed to the ‘suspicious foreigners’ quite literally. As a reporter, Jarda Bouček, on the other hand, was a veteran of several armed conflicts, and ‘verbal threats did not throw him off balance to that extent’.

From Bouček’s account it emerges that the journalists certainly did not have to leave Stanleyville for fear of losing their lives because of impetuous mob law imposed by Africans on whites. The Czechoslovak reporter’s son writes:

Before leaving for Congo, Bouček wrote to his editors that he would be able to stay in Stanleyville for about a month, and then he would have to come back to buy medicine, which in view of some chronic ailments he could not do without. His exit visa from Congo was signed by Louis Lumumba, brother of the murdered prime minister; before his departure, Bouček had arranged a return visa, as he foresaw that he would go back to Congo again.

According to Bouček’s account, the reporters left Congo because their money had run out, they weren’t sure if their dispatches were getting through, and an opportunity had presented itself in the form of a UN plane flying to Burundi. Bouček challenges Kapuściński’s account of the UN staff ’s alleged reluctance to help their group; unlike Kapuściński, he claims they knew from the start that they were flying to Usumbura. Bouček Jr again:

Writing further about how the Belgians were determined to kill them all, [Kapuściński] probably let himself be excessively frightened by the bravado-filled utterances of some young Belgian officers who cast swaggering remarks in their direction, such as, ‘Best shoot these journalists right away!’

In no instance did Bouček feel fear that the Belgians were planning to kill them. Usumbura was a civilian airport; in addition to the soldiers, the civilian airport staff was there too, as well as some customs officers, pilots and stewardesses from Sabena airlines, and passengers who would have involuntarily been witnesses to such a crime.

But above all – what sense would it have made for the Belgians to put to death five journalists who were officially accredited by the UN?

The younger Bouček sums up the situation by saying that ‘the expedition to Congo did not shake’ his father ‘in the least’.

Many of Kapuściński’s friends and acquaintances think he was a catastrophist, in the sense that he could blow up small incidents to unimaginable proportions and present ordinary fears as the end of the world.

‘I divided everything he said by at least two,’ says Adam Daniel Rotfeld, smiling.

The words of one of his friends come back to me – Kapuściński created his own courage in literature; he knew he was different.

Part of the legend of Kapuściński the reporter is based on the several times he avoided execution by firing squad. We know about all those incidents from him alone. In Bolivia, as he tells us, he was saved by a chauffeur who managed to intoxicate the officer who apparently wanted to shoot Kapuściński as a communist spy. In another of his accounts, after a coup in Ghana they wanted to shoot him as a spy working for Kwame Nkrumah, who had just been deposed.

He was also reportedly sentenced to be shot dead in Usumbura at the end of the Congolese expedition, after being locked up in a barred room at the airport along with the Czechoslovak and Soviet journalists. In a 1978 interview with Wojciech Giełżyński, he refers to ‘when I was in prison in Usumbura sentenced to be shot’. ‘I had a death sentence, I escaped shooting by a miracle,’ he says of this incident in another interview, also from the 1970s.

Zygmunt Kwas, Kielce Boy Scout

 

Adapted from Muzeum Historii Kielc biography:

 

Zygmunt Kwas (aka Kościelny) was born in Kielce on 18 February 1926. From 1937 to 1939, he belonged to the 12th Kielce Scout Troop, along with Wojtek Szczepaniak; he joined the clandestine Scouting movement in November 1939. Together with Stanisław Wdowicz (aka Borzęcki), whom he met while working as a messenger at the Ludwików Steelworks, he published the Scout magazine Powstaniec [Insurgent]. Along with his friend Zygmunt Pietrzak (aka Bekas), he joined the [anticommunist] Nie organization in 1945. In May of that year, he freed the wounded Pietrzak, arrested by the Security Office, from the prison hospital by disarming a prison guard.

In 1946, Kwas was arrested and imprisoned in Kielce prison. He was subjected to a brutal interrogation. On 13 September, under unclear circumstances, he was shot in his cell by a guard and died shortly thereafter. The funeral was attended not only by Scouts from the Kielce "Gray Ranks" but also by numerous Scouts from all units, as well as schoolchildren, acquaintances, and friends. He was buried at the Old Cemetery in Kielce.

Since 1993, the street running along the Old Cemetery, near his grave, formerly that of [Soviet General] Ivan Konev, has been named after him.

Much more here.

Forsaking Poland for Africa

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 119-120:

The expedition to Congo is a crucial element in the formation of Kapuściński’s world outlook, his view of the Cold War conflict and of the dilemmas and dramas of the times from the perspective of the Third World countries attempting to gain their liberty.

In an entry in his Political Diaries dated 23 June 1961, Polityka’s editor-in-chief, Mieczysław Rakowski notes: ‘Rysiek has finished a series entitled ‘‘Congo Close Up’’. We published twelve reports. Rysiek is a fantastic reporter. This is no ordinary journalism. This is political literature produced by a devilishly talented writer. We collected 2,687,138 zloty for the Lumumba Fund.’

A year later, in a popularity contest for Polityka’s writers, Kapuściński comes first. His reports from Ghana and Congo play their role in gaining him fame and public recognition, but this is not the only way he displays his talents. In less than two years of working at Polityka, Kapuściński has created his own language, a new literary style, with a poetic rhythm to his sentences and an original way of depicting things – free of the wooden, propagandistic phraseology of his early years as a journalist at Sztandar Młodych. It is this new language and new tone that make the then cub reporter Małgorzata Szejnert (later co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza and head of its reportage department for fifteen years) think on reading one of his reports: ‘He writes as he wants to.’

‘He flourished at Polityka,’ says Daniel Passent. ‘He wrote articles that showed what was really happening in Poland, warts and all.’

Between the African trips, Kapuściński travels to the Polish provinces, but he is not yet aware that his current visits will be his farewell – as a reporter – to Poland. A curious farewell, because he had just begun to shine as an incisive observer of the Poles during the ‘minor stabilization’ when he went off on a completely different path.

‘He deserted,’ some people would say.

Kapuściński refutes the charges: ‘Africa and the Third World were a continuation of the heroic period of reportage in Poland.’

Polityka Replaces Po Prostu, 1957

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 103-104:

The place on the political and cultural map of People’s Poland where this intellectual can find a safe haven is the newly founded weekly Polityka (Politics). Sacked from his job as managing editor of Sztandar Młodych, Marian Turski has moved to Polityka, bringing with him the group of journalists who resigned in a gesture of solidarity against his dismissal. Among them is Kapuściński.

Polityka had a terrible start. It was established in January 1957 by the Central Committee secretariat. Stefan Żółkiewski – Marxist scholar of the humanities, and minister of higher education (years later, to show solidarity, he would support the Warsaw University students demonstrating against the authorities) – was put in charge. This happened before the closure of the revisionist weekly Po Prostu – Polityka was meant to be a whip to beat the revisionists, an anti–Po Prostu publication. It was seen as heralding the departure of First Secretary Gomułka from the ideals of October ’56, and as a desire to exercise full control over intellectual life and thought, which had been relatively free during the years of the thaw and the October movement.

The revisionists from Po Prostu – ‘the rabid’, as their opponents call them – regard Polityka as a ‘despot’s organ’, a paper that on Gomułka’s orders is to determine the political line for the entire press. Both editorial offices are located within the Palace of Culture and Science, Po Prostu on the fifth floor and Polityka on the eleventh. The Po Prostu people are so allergic to the Polityka people that when they don’t have enough glasses in their office, and the head of administration amicably wants to borrow some from Polityka six floors above, the Po Prostu staff have a meeting, debate the idea, hold a vote and reject it.

When Gomułka closes down Po Prostu in the autumn of 1957, the editors of Polityka welcome the move. Many people assume that once the revisionists’ weekly has been eliminated, Polityka will have carried out Party orders and may leave the press scene. Meanwhile, under the management of its new chief, Mieczysław Rakowski, a former political officer and Party apparatus man, Polityka is changing from a dull, sermonizing newspaper into the most interesting weekly with a Party stamp. It will train the journalistic stars of the generation, create the Polish school of reportage and become a notorious thorn in the side of the government, a disparaging and sometimes ironic internal critic of the Party and the realities of People’s Poland. Marian Turski will say that Polityka began by being branded anti–Po Prostu but ended up becoming a sequel to its revisionist predecessor.

The Thaw Hits Poland, 1956

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 83-85:

When did the cultural dissent, later known as revisionism, cease to be partly fashion and become front-line politics?

It starts with a secret speech by Khrushchev, given in February 1956 in Moscow at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Its content creates a sensation in Poland: here is the Soviet Party admitting to murder, to the destruction of its political opponents, to fabricated trials. Knowledge of similar methods used by the authorities in People’s Poland has already reached certain segments of public opinion: almost two years earlier, Józef Światło, deputy director of Department X at the Ministry of Public Security, defected to the West and exposed crimes committed by the Polish apparatus of repression (his department was involved in eradicating ideological deviations within the Party). The Poles hear these revelations on Radio Free Europe; those who are glued to their wireless sets manage to catch bits of these nightmarish stories despite the jamming devices working at full steam.

Khrushchev’s speech initiates a political earthquake throughout the socialist bloc, most of all in Poland and Hungary. It is discussed at Party meetings, in cultural circles and on the streets. Duplicated using crude methods, the key points of the speech can be bought for an astronomical sum at flea markets and bazaars. At exactly the same time, Polish Party leader Bolesław Bierut dies in mysterious circumstances, prompting a wave of speculation: Was he murdered? Soon there’s a popular saying: ‘He went out in a fur overcoat and came home in a wooden overcoat.’ Straight after that the Party’s number two, Jakub Berman, is thrown out of his job. The Party is bursting from the inside.

There is a clash between two tendencies, later called fractions. One group is known as the ‘Puławians’ – people who seek more civic freedom, relative autonomy in cultural life, more democracy within the Party, less central planning within the economy, and more independence for enterprises. They have the sympathy of opinion-forming circles and of many people in the press and the cultural world. (It is interesting to note that they meet at the flat of Ignacy Loga-Sowiński, secretary of the Central Council of Trade Unions, and Irena Tarłowska, still editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych). The other group is called the ‘Natolinians’. They are believed to have connections with the Soviet embassy; they’re not keen on democratization, but they’re not against sacrificing a few scapegoats, preferably of Jewish origin, on the altar of squaring accounts with Stalinism.

The political prisoners are released, including people from the post-war anti-communist underground as well as followers of the ‘new faith’, who were locked up for being critical or as a result of internal power struggles. Functionaries within the apparatus of repression who have been particularly cruel to the prisoners lose their jobs and are accused of abusing their power. The Stalinist system is collapsing . . .

In June the workers’ rebellion in Poznań occurs. After several days of strikes and street demonstrations, the army and the secret police fire on the protestors. Several dozen people are killed, and many are wounded. A Party plenum calls the Poznań revolt ‘counter-revolutionary’ and a campaign by ‘imperialist circles’. Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz warns that any hand raised against the people’s power will be cut off. The entire movement for renewal finds itself under threat. A day after the massacre, on the orders of the Party leadership, Sztandar Młodych – like other papers – writes about the tragedy in a tone ringing with Stalinist propaganda:

...

The Poznań tragedy is a shock, especially for those who still believe in socialism but want it to be thoroughly reformed. As a result, the workers’ protest, the massacre and the Party leadership’s conservative attitude to the tragedy accelerate the impetus for change. At the production plants, workers councils are established, and pro-democratization rallies are held at schools and colleges. The culmination of the political turmoil is a Party plenum held in October. Comrades from Moscow fly to Warsaw, headed by Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Khrushchev, and Soviet troops move towards the capital. There is a fear that their tanks will run down the Polish movement for the renewal of socialism.

The crisis ends with the election of a new Party chief, Władysław Gomułka, who led the communists during the war and who has recently been released from prison. He was sent to jail in the early 1950s for so-called rightist–nationalist leanings. Gomułka – who installed the Stalinist system in post-war Poland, took part in the elimination of the opposition, and agreed to Poland’s becoming subordinate to the Soviet Union – did, however, want Polish socialism to retain some specific national features. He was not a fan of collectivization; he was in no rush to condemn the ‘Yugoslav path to socialism’, which was independent of Stalin; and he was fond of the national features of Polish Socialist Party tradition.

Kapuściński Exposes Nowa Huta

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 81-83:

Kapuściński and Szczęsnowicz share a rented room in one of Nowa Huta’s small hotels. They expect to have a boring time trudging about the building site and having cliché conversations with the workers. And suddenly they discover an unknown world whose existence they have never imagined.

In his report to the Central Committee, Szczęsnowicz writes that ‘you won’t be able to educate the young people building Nowa Huta with the help of a church and a wretched pub selling vodka’. The image that Kapuściński paints in his report, entitled ‘This Is Also the Truth about Nowa Huta’, prompts the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych to say, ‘This will never get through.’

What won’t get through?

The story about the pimping mother, who sits in one room collecting money for services provided by her daughter in the next room. Or the one about the fourteen-year-old girl who has infected eight boys and ‘described her exploits in such a vulgar way that one felt like vomiting’. Or the young married couples who spend their wedding nights in gateways and ditches (‘whoever thought up the brilliant idea that married couples can only stay together in a hotel room until eight p.m.?’).

A worker friend tells Kapuściński that he will never marry, because in these conditions he would be bound to ‘have no respect for his wife’.

[A]t Huta the bureaucracy reaches a degree of barbarity. For example, a woman living in a workers’ hotel is going to give birth. There are six other girls living in the same room. After three months she is supposed to go back to work. She doesn’t: she works at Huta, several kilometres from the hotel, but she has to feed her baby four times a day. Nevertheless, they tell her to bring a certificate proving that she is working. Yes, but she cannot get one. Then along comes the hotel man, takes away her bedding, takes away everything that is not her property, and the woman and her baby are left on the bare floor-boards.

Kapuściński hears about the fortunes of his friends from a few years earlier who have had enough and refuse to put up with ‘all these obscenities’. One has written complaints and petitions, for which he has been punished by having his accommodation allotment withheld, despite the fact that he has a sick mother and his wife lives out in the countryside because they have no home of their own in the town. Another critic has been sacked from his job. Still another has been stymied by lethal rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker. Not the worst method either!’ he writes. ‘People can see what’s going on. It is as if some monstrous bureaucratic fungus has sprung up here, which is proliferating and crushing everything, but no one seems at all concerned.’ In his report, Kapuściński reveals that complaints about what is going on at Nowa Huta have reached the ZMP authorities in Warsaw, but no one cares and they have gone unanswered.

Instead of painting the world of Ważyk’s poem in rosy colours, Kapuściński adds even more black to it. He is on the side of the workers, who feel hurt by the poet’s words: ‘rabble’, ‘semi-deranged soul’, ‘inhuman Poland’, ‘a shambles’. ‘To them these expressions,’ writes Kapuściński, ‘are wrongful, untrue and insulting’; they feel as if ‘they are of no use to anyone, as if they are invisible’. ‘But they admit that many of the images in the poem are true, all the more since they all too rarely read the whole truth about themselves.’

Kapuściński ends with a challenge to the Party and the ZMP: ‘At Nowa Huta they must see that we are on the side of the working man every day of the week . . . The people at Nowa Huta are waiting for justice. They cannot wait for long. We have to go there and dig up everything that has been carefully hidden from human sight, and respond to a very large number of different questions.’

...

Now the Party reformers go on the counter-offensive. Jerzy Morawski, one of the leading lights of the thaw (and soon to become Tarłowska’s second husband), devises a Central Committee commission to investigate the situation at Nowa Huta. The commission goes to the site and sees . . . the same things as Kapuściński. The ‘commissars’ try to get in touch with the reporter, but the ZMP members at Nowa Huta, who have given him shelter, say they won’t give up their colleague until the Party provides a guarantee that nothing bad will happen to him. The Party not only provides the guarantee but gives him a national decoration – the Gold Cross of Merit. Tarłowska and the friendly censor return to their jobs. Soon Trybuna Ludu (The People’s Tribune), the organ of the Central Committee, is writing about the social ills at Nowa Huta. The paper brands the local Party organization as the culprits, the board of the conglomerate is replaced, and the local Party authorities offer their resignation.

Kapuściński learns three lessons from this story. He discovers that writing is a risky business and that written words carry consequences. He also becomes convinced that the written word can change reality. Finally, as he learns from the story with the censor, success in the public sphere also depends on taking care of things through informal channels, and on building a network of personal contacts with people in power. If you have friends here and there, they will help you in times of need.

Kapuściński Joins the Party, 1953

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 55-57:

In 1952 Kapuściński writes an application requesting to be ‘admitted as a candidate for the Polish United Worker’s Party’.

It is my greatest need and desire to join the ranks of our beloved Party. This necessity is on a par with my greatest aspiration, which is to serve the cause of our Party with all my strength and my entire being. Throughout my life, ever since I understood to whom I should devote it, I have felt how every victory brings me closer to the Party, and how every defeat or mistake demands that I make an even greater effort not to turn back on the road I have taken – the road to the Party.

Being admitted as a candidate for our Party will be a very great reward and honour for me, and also a very high obligation. I want even more and even better to live the Party life, to work and fight to fulfil the tasks set by the Party for the best Party comrades. I pledge to safeguard the recommendations which Comrade Stalin has vowed to protect and fortify in the name of all ‘people of a special cut’.

My guiding light shall be total dedication to becoming worthy of that title, and to remaining so for the rest of my life.

On the next few pages of his application to join the Party, Kapuściński provides a self-critical report, saying that the young communist in him did not awaken quickly enough: ‘My world outlook was still burdened by remnants of petty bourgeois ideology, there were many things I did not understand, and I did not feel the need to get involved.’

Among his mentors at this time he mentions Wiktor Woroszylski, a young socialist-realist poet and the editor of the culture section of the ZMP newspaper Sztandar Młodych, as well as several other poets and writers, above all Władysław Broniewski. (Someone later tells me that as president of the Young Writers’ Circle affiliated with the Polish Writers’ Union, Kapuściński made sure that the notoriously drunken Broniewski drank a bit less.)

In support of his application, Bronisław Geremek, Kapuściński’s fellow student in the year above, writes him a letter of recommendation: ‘I have known Comrade Ryszard Kapuściński since October 1951 from work within the ZMP organization at our college.’ As well as praising his ‘dedication and devotion, youthful enthusiasm and eagerness, militant attitude’, and also his ‘political sophistication’ and ‘exemplary moral attitude’, Geremek informs the Party of the candidate’s ‘serious mistakes and shortcomings’:

1) failure to understand the role of the Party organization within the faculty, an inappropriate, ill-considered attitude to his Party comrades in Year One,

2) an immature attitude to his studies, continuing from the previous year, which recently Comrade Kapuściński has managed to overcome, as evidenced by his good results in the summer session,

3) a not fully collective style for his work in managing the faculty organization, originating mainly from a lack of confidence in people and in the collective,

4) reluctance to accept criticism, and also too little self-criticism,

5) immaturity of decisions often involving youthful bluster and leftism.

‘That was the lyrical style required for recommending candidates to join the Party,’ explains the famous historian. ‘It wasn’t appropriate to give nothing but praise.’

Despite his critical words, Geremek supports Kapuściński’s request, ‘in the belief that our Party will gain a member worthy of it’.

On 30 June 1952 a meeting of the PZPR executive at the history faculty is held to discuss admitting Kapuściński to the Party. The participants include Bronisław Geremek, Adam Kersten, Jerzy Holzer and a few other activists. The candidate is present too.

Comrade Kersten takes the floor:

‘Comrade Kapuściński shows evidence of a certain failure to appreciate the value of academic studies. For Comrade Kapuściński, the chief measure of an activist is social work.’

Another comrade polemicizes:

‘Comrade Kersten is somewhat overcritical of Comrade Kapuściński’s academic situation. This issue came up in the winter session. Comrade Kapuściński’s attitude to his studies has now changed for the better.’

Comrade Geremek stipulates:

‘Comrade Kapuściński should be cut off from organizational work so that he can put more emphasis on his studies. Comrade Kapuściński does not always know how to work with colleagues who are not committed.’

Comrade Kapuściński defends himself:

‘What has been said in the discussion is fair, but I am sorry it has been limited to academic issues. I did indeed have a non-Party attitude to my studies, and I have not yet fully overcome that attitude.’

Comrade Holzer rushes to Comrade Kapuściński’s rescue.

‘He has done good work on the ZMP Faculty Board. He has a strong emotional attachment to the Party. He is highly enthusiastic and eager to work. He has not entirely overcome the following defects: an insufficiently serious attitude to his studies, not always fully considered decisions, and a not always self-critical approach. Being admitted as a candidate for the Party will help Comrade Kapuściński to overcome these faults.’

From the stenographic record: ‘Comrade Kapuściński was unanimously accepted as a candidate for the PZPR’; he becomes a Party member on 11 April 1953.

Polish Realia: Funerals

Wojewódski Szpital Zespolony w Kielcach
'County General Hospital in Kielce'

Zakaz wjazdu na teren prosektorium za wyątkiem rodzin osób zmarłych oraz przedsiębiorstw pogrzebowych dowożących i wywożących osoby zmarłe.
'No entry on the property of the morgue, except for families of the deceased and funeral homes delivering and removing the deceased.'

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Usługi Pogrzebowa 'Funeral Services'
Telefony Całodobowe 'Telephones Always Available'

Dom Pogrzebowy 'Home Funerals'
Nowoczesne Chłodnie 'Modern Cold Storage'
Przewoży Zmarłych z Domów i Szpitali 'Moving bodies from homes and hospitals'
Oryginalne Karawany 'Original Caravans'
Autokary 'Coaches'

Kaplice Pożegnań 'Chapel Farewells'
Producent Trumien 'Making Coffins'
Kremacje, Urny 'Cremation, Urns'
Katakumby, Nagrobki 'Crypts, Tombstones'
Wieńce, Wiązanki 'Wreaths, Bouquets'

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Zniczomat 'Lanternmat' (at the cemetery)
Automat z Wkładami do Zniczy 'Automated Candle Dispenser for Lanterns'

Strefa Zniczo Dzielenia 'Lantern Sharing Zone'
Znicze w Tórnego Obiegu 'Lanterns in Circulation'
Nie wyrzucaj zniczy 'Don't discard lanterns'
Podziel się z innym 'Share them with others'

1 Dopasuj wysokość wykładu 'Measure the height of the product/candle'
2 Kup wykład 'Buy the product/candle' (Dotknij ekran 'Touch screen')
3 Odbierz wykład 'Pick up the product/candle'

Pierwszy taki automat w Polsce! 'The first such automat in Poland!'

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