World War 2 begins | Remembering September 1939

‘I am 7 years old, I am standing in a meadow… & I am staring at some dots moving ever so slightly in the sky. Suddenly nearby, at the edge of the forest, there is a terrible boom, & I can hear bombs exploding with a hellish bang (only later will I discover that they are bombs, because at that moment I still don’t know such a thing as a bomb exists…) & I see gigantic fountains of earth flying into the air. I want to run towards this extraordinary show… the shining silver aeroplanes, the boom of the bombs, the plumes of earth flying up as high as the trees… but a hand grabs my arm from behind & pulls me over onto the meadow. “Lie down” I hear my mother’s trembling voice say, “Don’t move”… ‘It is night, & I want to sleep, but… we have to go, we have to escape… I understand that escape has become an absolute necessity, a new form of life, because everyone is escaping; all the highways, roads & even the field tracks are full of wagons, carts & bicycles, full of bundles, cases, bags & buckets, full of terrified people wandering helplessly. Some are escaping to the east, others to the west… ‘We pass battlefields strewn with abandoned equipment, bombed-out railway stations, & cars turned on their sides. There is a smell of gunpowder, a smell of burning, a smell of rotting meat. Everywhere we come upon the dead bodies of horses… either lying in the road, or in the ditch next to it, or somewhere further off in a field… I do not see any dead people anywhere, because they are buried quickly, just endless corpses of horses… as if it wasn’t a war between people, but horses. ‘For a long time I thought this was the only world, that this is how it looks, & this is what is like. That is understandable – the war years were the period of my childhood, then of my early adolescence, my first understanding, the birth of my consciousness. So it seemed to me that not peace, but war is the natural state, or even the only one, the only form of existence, that wandering, hunger & fear, air raids & fires, round-ups & executions, lies & screaming, contempt & hatred were the natural, eternal state of affairs, the meaning of life, the essence of existence.’ ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski