The story of Miłosz from the Captive Mind

In the last chapter of the Captive Mind Miłosz tries to explain what led him to the difficult decision of emigration. He can't understand it himself as well. Especially that he had certain assets assuring his future happiness in Poland under the Soviets control. Miłosz states that if he could define his way of thinking he would be a wise man, a teacher of philosophers. He believes that his motives lied deep in his past in one incident he recounts:

"In my wondering at the beginning of the second World War, I happened to find myself, for a very short while, in the Soviet Union. I was waiting for a train in one of the large cities of the Ukraine. It was a gigantic station. Its wall were hung with portraits and banners of inexpressible ugliness. A dense crowd dressed sheep-skin coats, uniforms, fur caps, and woolen kerchiefs filled every availlable space and tracked thick mud mud over the tiled floor. The marble stairs were covered with sleeping beggars, their bare legs sticking out of their tatters [...]. Over them loudspeakers shouted propaganda slogans. As I was passing through the station I suddenly stopped and looked. A peasant family - husband and wife and two children - had settled down by the wall. They were sitting on baskets and bundles. The wife was feeding the younger child; the husband, who had a dark wrinkled face and a black, dropping moustache was pouring tea out of a keetle into a cup for the older boy. They were whispering to each other in Polish. I gazed at them until I felt moved to the point of tears. What had stopped my steps so suddenly and touched me so profoundly was their difference. This was a human group, an island in a crowd that lacked something proper to humble, ordinary human life. The gesture of a hand pouring tea, the careful delicate handing of the cup to the child, the worried words I guessed from the movement of their lips, their isolation, their privacy in the midst of the crowd - that is what moved me. For a moment, then, I understood something that quickly slipped from my grasp."