The Life and Legacy of Pope John Paul II (2 page)

Others took note of Karol’s exceptional piety. A teacher remarked in his school records on his “special predilection” for the topic of Religion. For two years, he led the Marian Sodality at his school, thus beginning his lifelong devotion to the Holy Mother. On one terrible occasion, the school custodian was fatally hit by a car right in front of the school. Out of an entire school of horrified onlookers, it was Karol, the altar boy, who thought to run for the priest to administer last rights. Nevertheless, while many acquaintances envisioned a vocation for him, Karol at that time saw a future devoted to literature and the theater.

Karol Wojtila and the Jews, the First Chapter

Although the Jewish presence in Poland would be virtually obliterated in W.W.II, Jews in pre-war Poland were a very sizable and important minority. They were thoroughly incorporated into Polish society, having been present in Poland since at least as early as the 10th century. The town of Wadowice, however, was a bit more ethnically uniform. By the start of W.W.II, Jews comprised only an estimated 10–20 percent of the population, substantially lower than in other parts of Poland. Nevertheless, Jews formed the second-largest demographic segment in Wadowice. They were principally artisans and shopkeepers; some were professionals.

Accordingly, young Karol grew up sharing life with his Jewish neighbors. Karol’s elementary school class was at least one-fourth Jewish. The Wojtila family lived in a modest but middle-class three-room apartment, which was rented from a Jewish landlord. The landlord’s glass goods shop was located at street level, and another Jewish family, the Beers, also lived within the building. Karol had Jewish friends and sometimes substituted on the Jewish soccer team when their goalkeeper wasn’t available. Among his very best friends while growing up was Jerzy (“Jorek”) Kluger, whose attorney father was the elected head of Wadowice’s Jewish community and had been an officer with Pilsudsky’s legions. “Jorek” and “Lolek” played “Cowboys and Indians” together and remained close throughout their school years. In one instance, Karol and his father, at the invitation of Jerzy’s father, attended a synagogue cantorial performance by a renowned young Jewish soldier who was stationed in the local garrison. A number of other Christian notables in the community attended that performance as well.

Later, when the teenaged Karol became active in youth theater, one of his frequent leading ladies was his neighbor, the beautiful Regina (“Ginka”) Beers, with whom he shared romantic scenes. In addition, Father Leonard Prowchownik, who decried Poland’s Nazi-inspired economic boycott of Jews, became pastor at St. Mary’s and was highly influential in maintaining an atmosphere of tolerance in the town. Father Prowchownik and Jerzy’s grandmother could often be seen walking together and holding lively discussions. (Since both were deaf, the discussions were also loud.) These and other experiences would drive Karol’s later decisions as pope to build bridges with the Jewish community.

The Darkening Sky

Hitler came to power in Germany at the beginning of 1933, and the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses followed soon after. The Nuremberg Laws depriving Jews of German citizenship and instituting other draconian restrictions were introduced in 1935. Across the border in Poland, instability was growing even before the two Karols left Wadowice for Krakow. The great Polish hero Jozef Pilsudski had held a tolerant position toward Poland’s ethnic minorities. When he died in 1935, the floodgates of anti-Semitism opened, fanned by what was happening in nearby Germany. One of those inciting hatred was Cardinal Augustin Hlond, the primate of Poland, who used a pastoral letter to launch a vituperative attack against Jews in general and Polish Jews in particular.

Within Wadowice, however, Father Prowchownik had a more direct impact, and he was counseling that anti-Semitism was anti-Christian. Even so, there were outbursts of anti-Semitism in Wadowice during Karol’s senior year of high school. After a particularly bad incident, the normally reserved Captain Wojtila took pains to send warm regards to Jerzy’s father, thus making clear his own opposition to the nastiness that had occurred.

The Wojtila’s friend and neighbor, young Ginka Beers was an aspiring physician and two years older than Karol. Feeling the press of anti-Semitism during a brief, unpleasant stint at Jagiellonian University, she decided to try her luck in British Mandate Palestine. Both Karols were profoundly disturbed by her leaving. The elder Karol plaintively reminded her that not all Poles were anti-Semitic. The younger Karol became red-faced and teary-eyed and was too upset to speak. By leaving when she did, Ginka would escape the Holocaust, but her parents and sister would perish.

Jerzy Kluger was experiencing similar problems. He left his engineering studies in Warsaw after only one month because of increasingly violent anti-Semitism. Having repeatedly refused to sit in the back of the classroom, he was viciously beaten several times. When his father visited Warsaw and discovered Jerzy’s badly bruised face, he forced him to return home to Wadowice.

For his part, Karol began his university studies in the fall of 1938. Due to the ominous militarization of Germany, he had to take part in compulsory Polish military training both before and after his first year of university, but he was exempted from regular military service because of his studies. Thus, he was in Krakow preparing for the new school year when on September 1, 1939, the first air raid sirens sounded the German invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II. He assisted with Mass at the Wawel Cathedral, as was his custom on the first Friday of the month, and then hurried home to his father. They joined the flood of refugees fleeing eastward. Dodging the strafing German planes that killed many tens of thousands fleeing on foot like themselves, they advanced about one hundred miles, only to hear that the Russians were now invading from the east.

There had long been enmity between Poles and Russians. Many Poles now feared the godlessness of the Soviets even more than the brutality of the Germans. The elder Wojtila was exhausted. Father and son decided to return to Krakow.

The Nazi plan for Poland was to create
Lebensraum
—“living space”—for ethnic Germans. Their short-term plan for the Polish people was to reduce the population to manageable numbers and employ the survivors as slave laborers. Depopulation of the territory would take place, in part, through long-term starvation. Poles were expected to subsist on a diet so minimal that it weakened resistance to disease, and food became largely unavailable to them. (Two years later, the Nazi governor Hans Frank would estimate that the majority of Poles were consuming only 600 calories per day.) Poles would be kept uneducated, unaware, and hence unable to mount an organized resistance. In order to accomplish that aim, the Polish intelligentsia had to be liquidated, and all residue of Polish national identity had to be obliterated.

On a single day in November 1939, 183 students, professors, and other staff of Jagiellonian University were arrested and deported to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. The university was closed, along with all other institutions of secondary and higher education in Poland. At least thirty-four professors and other staff of the university would be killed in the course of the war, either in concentration camps or by the Soviets.

In this setting, any act of Polish cultural resistance was heroic and accomplished at the risk of one’s own life and the lives of others. And that is precisely where we locate Karol Wojtila, who became one of approximately 800 students studying clandestinely when the university took its operations underground. He was also deeply involved in keeping Polish theater alive. The performances took place before small groups of people in private apartments. Karol even wrote several plays based on Old Testament topics but inspired by the Nazi oppression. In addition, he translated Sophocles’
Oedipus
from Greek into Polish. All such activities had to be undertaken between work time and curfew. Going out after curfew meant being shot. Being caught at what they were doing would also have meant being shot.

Beatings, shootings, and roundups were part of everyday life. With the university officially closed, it was necessary for Karol to obtain a work permit in order to remain in Krakow without being deported to a forced labor camp or executed. Initially he was able to work as a messenger, but after a time he was forced into manual labor for the Solvay chemical company. For an entire bitter winter, he shoveled limestone outdoors in a quarry. Those who knew him then say he responded to the unaccustomed work stoically, quietly.

He was engaged in this harsh manual labor for only a few months. In the spring, he became the assistant of the quarry’s blaster. The following fall, in 1941, he was transferred to a different site, the Solvay factory’s water purification unit. There, he received additional food, since the plant fed the workers soup with a bit of bread. Working the night shift, he was able to sneak time to read. One of the books he read at that time held the writings of St. Louis Grignon de Montfort, from whom he learned that true Marian piety was focused on Christ, since Mary, properly understood, was the first disciple of Christ. At the same time, Karol also received an unexpected education in the life of a common laborer, which would later make him a better pastor.

The parish where he lived was struggling. Most of the priests had been arrested. As a result, the remaining priests turned to lay leaders for help, most notably Jan Tyranowski, who established a “Living Rosary,” comprised of groups of young men committed to prayer and spiritual growth. Each group had its own leader, and Karol was one of the earliest group leaders. The groups, of course, had to meet secretly. In addition, the group leaders met with Tyranowski for study, training, and guidance. In Jan Tyranowski, Karol found both a teacher and a role model. From the personal example of Tyranowski, he learned that lay people, not only priests, could be vessels for the holy in their daily lives. He took to heart an idea he heard from Tyranowski: it is not hard to be a saint. Very importantly, Tyranowski introduced him to the works of the Spanish mystic, Saint John of the Cross, who taught that God could only be reached by complete self-surrender.

During this time, some of Karol’s friends were involved in more activist types of resistance. Some were armed. Others helped save Jews by supplying them with false baptismal certificates to pass as Christians. Karol Wojtila never claimed to have saved any Jewish lives during the war. He said that he could not claim what he did not do. He provided what assistance he could to Poles whose family members had been arrested. In one case he showed up at work without a jacket because he had given his to a man without one. And he continued to believe in the power of prayer—so he prayed.

The Vocation

Captain Wojtila had taken to his bed shortly after Christmastime 1940. On a bitterly cold day in February 1941, Karol returned home from work to find his father dead, the blankets in which he was wrapped still warm. Even many years later, he confessed to being troubled that his father had died alone. He admitted that he was never so lonely as during the period after his father’s death. Some friends convinced him to come live with them for a time because they were worried about him.

Karol was twenty years old and an orphan. As difficult as this time was for him, it was now that his vocation began to come into focus. The trials and the joys of his life had coalesced to lead him to the priesthood. He contemplated this course for a while and then, in the fall of 1942, submitted himself at the archbishop’s residence as a candidate for the priesthood.

It was not a safe path to tread. Some students had already been executed, others sent to Auschwitz. The seminary had gone underground. Karol studied in secret while continuing to work for Solvay and perform in the clandestine theater. He was not to tell anyone what he was doing. Eventually, it became necessary to share the information with his theater friends, some of whom tried to change his mind.

When danger did come, it was not in the form expected. In February 1944, Karol was walking home from work in the factory when he was struck unconscious by a German truck. He experienced a severe concussion, cuts and bruises, and a shoulder injury. He awoke in the hospital with a bandaged head and his arm in a cast, and he remained in the hospital for the next two weeks. Did this head injury play a role in his later Parkinson’s disease? Perhaps one day, science will clarify the possible links. For his part, Karol considered his survival an act of grace.

The Polish Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944. To prevent a similar occurrence in Krakow, the Nazis began rounding up young men. Karol was actually hiding in his apartment when the house where he lived was searched by the Gestapo. Under the circumstances, the archbishop called his seminarians to take refuge within his residence. Studies now took place on a full-time schedule within those confines.

On January 17–18, 1945, the Nazis retreated from Krakow. One oppressive regime was replaced by another. The Soviet Union was now in control, and they installed a communist government. Karol continued his theological studies at the newly reopened Jagiellonian University and graduated in 1946. The archbishop, who by now had been named a cardinal, wanted Karol to continue his studies in Rome, so Karol’s installation as sub-deacon, deacon, and then priest followed in swift succession during the summer and fall of 1946. He left for Rome in mid-November 1946, traveling by train to Paris and then on to Rome. It was Father Wojtila’s first time outside of Poland.

Life as a Priest

Father Wojtila lived with other priests and seminarians in the Belgian College while studying at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St Thomas Aquinas. The international climate suited him. He was able to practice his French and German and began also to study Italian and English. He toured Rome and the Italian countryside with his colleagues, learning about the history of the Church through its historical sites. It was during this time that he made a visit San Giovanni Rotondo to see the famed stigmatist Padre Pio, whom he would later raise to sainthood. Like others, he was most impressed with Padre Pio’s evident suffering while celebrating Mass. In the summer, Father Wojtila was able to tour Europe to see firsthand how Catholicism was expressed in different locations. He made a pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Ars (France), where St John Mary Vianney, the Curé of Ars and patron saint of priests, resided. He came away committed to reaching out to laypeople through the confessional, as the Curé had done. This would become a focal point of his pastoral mission.