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 of famous political and cultural figures, including Kapuściński?
In post-1989 Poland, the parties and circles of the anti-communist right presented many people active in the spheres of politics and culture who in their youth had believed that communism was the future of the world as in fact traitors to the nation, cowards, careerists and villains. Kapuściński saw this drama affecting friends and acquaintances of his own generation, who were being verbally manhandled. He was afraid that he, too, would be pilloried by the press and subjected to public humiliation.
Kapuściński took criticism badly, and personal attacks made him almost ill. Shortly before his death a rumour was going around Warsaw that one of the commentary programmes on public television was going to examine his co-operation with the secret services in People’s Poland (also known as the Polish People’s Republic, or PRL for short). Stricken with terror, he called his friends and asked if anyone knew what on earth they wanted to bring up about him and what rod they intended to beat him with.
‘Dreadful chaps,’ he would say about right-wing politicians and commentators, lowering his voice. ‘Dreadful chaps.’
He had been expecting an attack on himself since the early 1990s. In the second half of that decade, the right-wing journals had begun to suggest that he owed his literary success to good connections with the communist government and co-operation with the PRL’s intelligence service. It was then that, in talking about his late father, Kapuściński would say that he escaped from Soviet captivity. Katyń was also mentioned.
In the history of Polish twentieth-century martyrology, Katyń is sacred. It is harder to throw stones at Katyń. If the father ‘escaped from a transport to Katyń’, the son must have known from the start that communism was a criminal system. And if he served that system, he did it without faith – like most Poles, he simply came to terms with communism and devised a way of surviving the best way he could. That, I think, must have been the underlying message of the legend of his father’s escape from being sent to Katyń.
I search for another hypothesis as well: the psychoanalytical one (for a short while I forget my own scepticism about this school of thought). In New York I meet Renata Salecl, an interpreter of the ideas of Lacan, and speak with her about Kapuściński’s Katyń confabulation. ‘In a son’s life, the father can be a figure prompting strong anxiety,’ she tells me. ‘The father’s absence, or his weakness, do not quell this anxiety at all. On the contrary, they can stir or provoke him into seeking a father substitute, who may for example be a cult political leader with whom he can identify.’
Salecl knows nothing about Kapuściński’s relationship with his father. Only after hearing her theoretical explanations do I tell her that the father was not an inspiration for Kapuściński. No doubt unconsciously and with no ill intent, Józef belittled his son’s efforts and achievements; truth be told, he did not fully comprehend either what his son did or who he was.
‘It is possible that in adding this strong element of Poland’s heroic, martyrological history to his father’s biography,’ Salecl then speculates, ‘Kapuściński as it were created him over again, built an authority which never existed, but which he so greatly needed.’ In fact, these comments harmonize quite well with what I have managed to establish about the son’s relationship with his father.