Postautor: Visitor » 22 sty 2006, 23:28
Born in 1932 in a town which now lies far beyond the Eastern border of Poland, he shared a typical biography of people living in those areas before and during the World War II: peaceful life in the so-called Kresy, the outbreak of the war, the Russian invasion, the German invasion, an escape to central Poland. As a child, Ryszard Kapuściński became familiar with war, death, poverty and hunger; as an adolescent he had an opportunity to experience totalitarianism in the post-war communist People’s Republic of Poland. Graduated from the secondary school in 1950, he began to work in a youth newspaper “Sztandar Młodych”, first as an office-boy and later as a reporter. Like most of his friends Kapuściński belonged then to the communist youth organization, ZMP, and, like some of them, he underwent a process of the evolution from naïve admiration of communism to noticing the reality lying beyond the world created by propaganda. Meanwhile, he studied at the history department of the Warsaw University and graduated in 1955.