Pope John Paul II - Early Life

Early Life

Karol Józef Wojtyła was born in the Polish town of Wadowice and was the youngest of three children of Karol Wojtyła, an ethnic Pole, and Emilia Kaczorowska, who is described as being of Lithuanian ancestry. His maternal grandmother's maiden surname was Scholz therefore Wojtyła could have had distant German ancestry. Emilia died in 1929, when Wojtyła was eight years old. His elder sister Olga had died before his birth, but he was close to his brother Edmund, nicknamed Mundek, who was 14 years his senior. Edmund's work as a physician eventually led to his death from scarlet fever, which affected Wojtyła.

As a boy, Wojtyła was athletic, often playing football as goalkeeper. During his childhood, Wojtyła had contact with Wadowice's large Jewish community. School football games were often organised between teams of Jews and Catholics, and Wojtyła often played on the Jewish side. "I remember that at least a third of my classmates at elementary school in Wadowice were Jews. At elementary school there were fewer. With some I was on very friendly terms. And what struck me about some of them was their Polish patriotism." Wojtyła's first, and possibly only, love affair was with a Jewish girl, Ginka Beer, who was described as "slender", "a superb actress" and "having stupendous dark eyes and jet black hair". On 13 April 1929, Wojtyla's mother died in childbirth.

In mid-1938, Wojtyła and his father left Wadowice and moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at Jagiellonian University. While studying such topics as philology and various languages, he worked as a volunteer librarian and was required to participate in compulsory military training in the Academic Legion, but he refused to fire a weapon. He performed with various theatrical groups and worked as a playwright. During this time, his talent for language blossomed, and he learned as many as 12 foreign languages, nine of which he used extensively as Pope.

In 1939, Nazi German occupation forces closed the university after invading Poland. Able-bodied males were required to work, so from 1940 to 1944 Wojtyła variously worked as a messenger for a restaurant, a manual labourer in a limestone quarry and for the Solvay chemical factory, to avoid deportation to Germany. His father, a non-commissioned officer in the Polish Army, died of a heart attack in 1941, leaving Wojtyła as the immediate family's only surviving member. "I was not at my mother's death, I was not at my brother's death, I was not at my father's death", he said, reflecting on these times of his life, nearly forty years later, "At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved."

After his father's death, he started thinking seriously about the priesthood. In October 1942, while the war continued, he knocked on the door of the Archbishop's Palace in Kraków and asked to study for the priesthood. Soon after, he began courses in the clandestine underground seminary run by the Archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Cardinal Sapieha. On 29 February 1944, Wojtyła was knocked down by a German truck. German Wehrmacht officers tended to him and sent him to a hospital. He spent two weeks there recovering from a severe concussion and a shoulder injury. It seemed to him that this accident and his survival was confirmation of his vocation. On 6 August 1944, ‘Black Sunday’, the Gestapo rounded up young men in Kraków to avoid an uprising similar to the recent uprising in Warsaw. Wojtyła escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's house at 10 Tyniecka Street, while the German troops searched above. More than eight thousand men and boys were taken that day, while Wojtyła escaped to the Archbishop's Palace, where he remained until after the Germans had left.

On the night of 17 January 1945, the Germans fled the city, and the students reclaimed the ruined seminary. Wojtyła and another seminarian volunteered for the task of clearing away piles of frozen excrement from the toilets. Wojtyła also helped a 14-year-old Jewish refugee girl named Edith Zierer, who had run away from a Nazi labour camp in Częstochowa. Edith had collapsed on a railway platform, so Wojtyła carried her to a train and stayed with her throughout the journey to Kraków. Edith credits Wojtyła with saving her life that day. B'nai B'rith and other authorities have said that Wojtyła helped protect many other Polish Jews from the Nazis. In Wojtyła's last book Memory and Identity he described the 12 years of the Nazi régime as 'bestiality', quoting from Polish theologian and philosopher Konstanty Michalski.