Magical Journalism: Childhood and War

By Ryszard Kapuściński

The other night I thought of a name for the writer/artist workshop idea I’d mentioned in last week’s post: The School of Magical Journalism.

I had to google the phrase, magical journalism, to see if it’s been claimed by somebody else. The only references I saw were to the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (1932—2007), whom I haven’t heard of before. I liked his Wikipedia entry and decided to buy his memoir about the Soviet Union, titled Imperium.

Reading it now, I feel like meeting an old friend.

I want to share a bit from the early part of the book, First Encounters (1939 — 1967).

At the time of the very first encounter — September 1939, the Red Army takes Polesie (now Belarus) — Kapuściński was 7 years old, and the USSR was only ten years older.

One day a car pulls into the schoolyard, and out step some gentlemen in sky-blue uniforms. Someone says that it’s the NKVD. What the NKVD is isn’t quite clear, but one thing is certain—when grown-ups utter this name, they lower their voice …