teaching the holocaust 2004 summer workshop - Southern Institute ...

JOHN PAUL II
32
Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born on May 18,
1920, in the small town of Wadowice in
southern Poland. His father was an officer
in the Polish army, and his mother died
when he was nine years old. Wojtyla was
born in a house owned by a Jewish family.
The house was across the street from a
Catholic church. Between twenty and thirty
percent of the town was Jewish. A neighbor
was Ginka (or Regina) Beer. Regina and
Wojtyla became close friends. Wojtyla’s first appearance in amateur theater (stage was an early
passion) was as Regina’s leading man. The Jews of Wadowice were murdered by the Nazis, and
the Polish population also suffered: the abbot of the Wadowice Discalced Caramelite’s
monastery and a dozen priests were killed at nearby Auschwitz. As a school boy Wojtyla
played soccer. The games were usually between Jewish and Polish teams, but Wojtyla often
played for the Jewish team when it needed a goalie. The historian Tad Szulc has written, “The
Jewish experience in Wadowice, with his youthful friendships, was among the influences
leading him to his role as champion of religious tolerance as Vatican Council bishop and as
pope.”
The town of Wadowice shared the anti-Semitism that was typical of Poland and that
intensified in the years of economic disaster immediately prior to World War II. Yet the
Wadowice parish priest Father Leonard Prochownik preached that “anti-Semitism is anti-
Christian.” When he returned to Poland on his fourth papal pilgrimage, John Paul said,
“Man lives on the basis of his own experiences. I belong to the generation for which
relationships with Jews was a daily occurrence.” Speaking of his youth in Wadowice, he said,
“... it is from there that I have this attitude of community, of communal feeling about the
Jews ... It all comes from there.” In 1937 Ginka Beer emigrated from Poland because of the
increasingly violent acts of anti-Semitism. Fifty years later she told an interviewer,
“ ... There was only one family who never showed any racial hostility toward us, and
that was Lolek and his dad ... I went to say goodbye to Lolek and his father. Mr.