I've written about him before. Here's at least one post about him, but there are many many more all over my site. He is someone I admire tremendously. Not just for the life he has lived, which is extraordinary, but because of his BOOKS, God, those BOOKS!!!
Kapuscinski grew up in Poland, and some of his first memories are of Germany's invasion of his country (he writes about this, very memorably, in his book on The Soviet Union, Imperium. Great book.) He was seven years old, in 1939.
Anyway, here is a new piece by Kapuscinski, written to commemorate the upcoming 60-year anniversary of the end of WWII. In it, he talks about his childhood experiences of invasion, what it was like, the sense-memories, etc.
The following paragraph is why I love this guy as a writer, and why he pretty much stands alone:
All through the war I dream of shoes. To have shoes. But how? What must one do to get a pair? In the summer I walk barefoot, and the skin of my soles is as tough as leather. At the start of the war, father made me a pair of shoes out of felt, but he is not a shoemaker and they look strange; besides, I've grown, and they are already too tight. I fantasise about a pair of big, strong, hobnailed shoes that make a distinctive noise as they strike the pavement. The fashion was then for high-topped boots; I could stare for hours at a good-looking pair. I loved the shine of the leather, loved listening to the crunching sound they made. But my dream of shoes was about more than beauty or comfort. A good, strong shoe was a symbol of prestige and power, a symbol of authority; a shoddy shoe was a sign of humiliation, the brand of a man who has been stripped of all dignity and condemned to a subhuman existence. But in those years, all the shoes I lusted for trod past me in the street with indifference. I was left in my rough wooden clogs with their uppers of black canvas, to which I would sometimes apply a crude ointment in an unsuccessful attempt to impart a tiny bit of lustre.Posted by sheila