Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  In 1937, the schools produced Słowacki’s Balladyna, a theatrical cocktail in which characters and situations drawn from Polish ballads were mixed with others taken from Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, King Lear, and so forth.81 At one performance, Wojtyła played two roles, having had to memorize overnight the part previously played by a youngster who was suspended for a school prank.82 The quality of this and the three other productions the school mounted in 1937–1938 can be inferred from the fact that the school-based theater of Wadowice went on tour, playing in other amateur theaters in the region and at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska.

  The parish also sponsored theatrical performances. Under the direction of Father Zacher, Wojtyła played Count Henryk, the co-lead, in one of the emblematic dramas of the Polish Romantic tradition, Zygmunt Krasiński’s The Undivine Comedy, which Mickiewicz called “the highest achievement of Slavic theater.”83 In this apocalyptic fable, Krasiński worked through his own dissatisfaction with the options history seemed to have conjured up, between disembodied spirituality and the ruthless materiality of modern, rationalist revolution. The main theme of this fable is that the revolution can be redeemed only by Christ.84 That Wadowice (and its parish church) would produce a play of such intensity and symbolic complexity tells us something about the cultural climate of the time and place. That a teenager could take on the role of Count Henryk is also instructive.

  During these days as a high school actor, Karol Wojtyła met Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, who deeply influenced his thinking about the relationship of the proclaimed word to the dynamics of history.

  When they met, Kotlarczyk was teaching history in the girls’ high school of Wadowice, where he had been born and raised. His father was a “fanatic for theater” who would “get a theatrical idea at night and wake the whole family to tell them about it.”85 The senior Kotlarczyk ran one of Wadowice’s theaters, in which his son played. Mieczysław studied at the Jagiellonian University, deepened his sense of the special qualities of Polish poetry, and did his doctoral dissertation on early nineteenth-century theater criticism. Afterward, he moved back to Wadowice as a teacher.86 What he really wanted to do was use the family theater as the vehicle for giving theatrical flesh to his distinctive, even radical, ideas about the drama and its relationship to life.

  Although the technical aspects of Kotlarczyk’s vision would develop over time, certain basic notions were in place during his period in Wadowice. As one of his most accomplished students put it years later, Kotlarczyk was both a “deep Christian believer” and “a man of one idea, the theater,” for whom the drama was the most important thing in life because it was a “way of perfection,” a means of “transmitting the Word of God,” the truth about life.87 He was seized by the power of words, not simply to communicate an idea, but to elicit an emotion, which was both entirely subjective and entirely objective, or true. Speech, in this understanding, came alive in the intimacy created between the one who spoke and the one who listened. The actor’s task was to introduce the listener to that intimacy by minimizing himself to the point where the truth of the spoken word could reach and touch the listener.88 Kotlarczyk tried to create a “theater of the inner word” in which plot, costumes, the dramatics of performance, and the other accouterments usually associated with theater were stripped to the bare minimum. What happened in the consciousness of the audience, which was made possible by the remarkable, self-denying discipline of Kotlarczyk’s actors, was what counted.89

  For Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, the actor had a function not unlike a priest: to open up, through the materials of this world, the realm of transcendent truth.90 His “theater of the inner word” would make present universal truths and universal moral values, which stood in judgment on the here-and-now and offered the world the possibility of authentic transformation. This “radical man,” “stubborn and fanatical,” went to the Salzburg Mozart Festival in 1937 and found it too focused on externals and spectacle. Only when “the word” had absolute priority could the theater be a way of perfection.91

  In 1936, Kotlarczyk took sixteen-year-old Karol Wojtyła, twelve years his junior, under his wing. Lolek was soon a regular visitor at Kotlarczyk’s home, where he and Halina Królikiewicz were tutored by the director in his unique way of articulating a poem or a script. According to Kotlarczyk’s sister, Mieczysław would walk up and down the family apartment, reciting a passage of poetry. Lolek would walk behind him, trying, and not always succeeding, to speak the way Kotlarczyk thought things should be spoken. Kotlarczyk would then cast Lolek and Halina opposite each other in performances in his theater.92

  By the end of his career as a high school actor and occasional director, which his father had encouraged, Karol Wojtyła was involved in something that went considerably beyond the aesthetic and intellectual boundaries of the typical local theater.93 Kotlarczyk’s emerging theories and Wojtyła’s immersion in the literature of Polish Romanticism had planted seeds for future reflection about the relationships between emotion and intellect, and between our perceptions of reality and the truth of things. Young Karol Wojtyła had also begun to think about the power of the word to transform history despite enormous material obstacles.

  Theater, for Wojtyła, was also an experience of community, the self-disciplined action of a group of individuals who, by blending their individual talents with the talents of others, become something more than the sum of their parts. And the intensity of the theatrical vocation, particularly according to Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, was, perhaps, the beginning of other intuitions to be pursued later. If drama could unveil the deeper dimensions of the truth of things, might there be a dramatic structure to every human life? To the whole of reality?

  ALMA MATER: THE JAGIELLONIAN UNIVERSITY

  Anti-Semitism began to emerge more publicly in Poland after the death of Józef Piłsudski, the dominant figure in the Second Polish Republic, in 1935. Economic boycotts of Jewish businesses were organized throughout the country and supported by newspapers and politicians maneuvering for position. Another aspiring Wadowice actress, Ginka Beer, left for Palestine after an anti-Semitic disciplinary action forced her out of medical school in Kraków. Lolek Wojtyła and Jurek Kluger visited her before she left. “Have you seen what’s happening against the Jews in Germany?” she demanded. “Well, something of the sort is going to happen here. And I can’t take it any more…it’s as if I can’t breathe. So I’ve decided to leave.” They walked her to the train station. She remembered years later that, as she left Wadowice, the elder Karol Wojtyła had said to her, “Not all Poles are anti-Semitic. You know I am not!” Eighteen-year-old Lolek was too upset to say anything.94

  In 1938, Jurek Kluger noticed that his father had added his Hebrew name to the nameplate of his office, the result of a new discriminatory law in support of the economic boycott. During their senior year of high school, Lolek and Jurek saw that some of their fellow students were joining anti-Semitic political parties. Fights occasionally broke out in school. Lolek defended his Jewish friends, and in the ongoing arguments cited Father Prochownik’s insistence that anti-Semites were anti-Christian. One night, a group of rowdies staged a demonstration in the market square and broke the windows of several shops and houses while yelling, “Economic boycotting is an act of patriotism!” The next day, Gebhardt, the history teacher and a fierce disciplinarian, came into the classroom strangely ill-at-ease. After a desultory lesson during which he was mostly silent, he turned to the students and said, “I hope none of my students are to be numbered among last night’s hooligans. I am speaking to you not as a history teacher but as a Pole. What happened has nothing to do with the tradition of our Fatherland.” He then read the class Adam Mickiewicz’s 1848 manifesto with its pledge of esteem to the Jewish elder brother in the faith of Abraham and the promise of a Poland of equal rights for all citizens. The captain was waiting for Lolek after school that day. He gave Jurek Kluger a rough hug and said, “How is your father? Please give him my regards. Don’t forget, will you?
”95

  Karol Wojtyła, Jerzy Kluger, and their classmates graduated from high school on May 27, 1938, with Lolek as class valedictorian. At the commencement ball, the new graduates danced late into the night, Karol Wojtyła and Halina Królikiewicz among them. The good-byes were shadowed by foreboding. That summer, Lolek did his national service on a road construction job in the town of Zubrzyca Górna. He later recalled that he spent most of his time peeling potatoes.96

  In the summer of 1938, Karol Wojtyła and his father left Wadowice and moved to Kraków, where Lolek would begin his studies at the Jagiellonian University in the fall semester. They lived in the basement flat of a house originally built by Emilia’s brother at the end of World War I; Emilia’s two surviving sisters lived on the top two floors.97 The house, at Tyniecka, 10, in the Dębniki district, was nicely located on the south bank of the Vistula, from which there was a commanding view of Wawel castle and cathedral, beyond which rose the spires emerging from the heart of Kraków’s Old Town. A brief stroll took one to the Dębniki market square. The parish church of St. Stanisław Kostka, stolid, working-class Dębniki’s sole experiment in art deco architecture, was also nearby. The university was a twenty-minute walk away, across the Dębniki Bridge and into the Old Town.

  The convenient location aside, the apartment was often referred to by friends as “the catacombs.” The entrance was on the side of the house and opened into a corridor that divided the flat in two. To the left was Lolek’s room, then his father’s; to the right was a kitchen, then a bathroom. It was dark and damp, and in the winter the old-fashioned, coal-fired tile stoves couldn’t keep the chill out of the air.98

  Its lack of creature comforts was likely lost on young Karol Wojtyła, who was used to austerity and who was soon involved in the multiple worlds of undergraduate life at the Jagiellonian University. Founded in 1364, the Jagiellonian was one of Europe’s most distinguished centers of learning. In 1413, the university’s rector, Paweł Włodkowic, had gone from Kraków to the Council of Constance to argue against coercion in the conversion of the pagan Lithuanians.99 Here was where Copernicus, who would shatter the cosmology of the ancient world, had been educated. Here was where dozens of generations of scholars had pondered the inscription over the entrance to the Great Hall of the university’s Collegium Maius—Plus ratio quam vis: “Reason rather than force.” For six centuries, the Jagiellonian was a crossroads of Christian and humanistic culture. As Karol Wojtyła would write years later, it was difficult to study at such a university without being moved emotionally; its pathways could not be walked “without due piety.”100

  In his freshman year Lolek took a demanding academic load: courses on Polish etymology, phonetics, and inflection and on the interpretation of literary texts; surveys of medieval, modern, and contemporary Polish poetry, dramas, and novels; introductory courses in Russian; and a survey of the grammar of Old Church Slavonic, the historic basis of modern Slavic languages. To continue their undergraduate program, Polish philology students like Wojtyła had to pass two stringent exams at the end of their first year, in Polish grammar and Old Church Slavonic. Both were considered crucial for dealing with the philological challenges ahead.

  In the course of these preliminary studies, Karol Wojtyła began to realize “more fully…what language is,” as he wrote later. He had long been “passionate about belles lettres and above all Polish literature.”101 Now he began to grasp something of “the mystery of language itself,” that “without language there would be no literature”: the human capacity for language made the human world, including the world of literature, possible.102 Already on his way to being a genuine polyglot, the freshman, powerfully struck by the rich diversity of the world’s languages, was eager to delve deeper into their common structures and their singularities. The young philologist, he mused decades later, might well “have ended [up] with linguistics” as a scholarly profession.103

  Wojtyła also immersed himself in theatrical activities. At the end of the 1938–1939 academic year, he played Sagittarius in a fantasy-fable, The Moonlight Cavalier, produced by the experimental theater troupe that would become known as “Studio 39.” The play, which featured characters from the Zodiac and some improvisational satire on local personalities and issues, was performed in the courtyard of the Collegium Maius. Poland’s leading actor, Juliusz Osterwa, was in the audience. Impressed, he invited the student actors to his apartment afterward and told them to keep in touch.

  During the year, Lolek also joined several student groups involved in poetry recitations and became a member of the Circle of Scholars of Polish Studies, a student organization that did literary readings, discussed curriculum reform, and resisted the restrictions on Jews studying at the Jagiellonian. He began taking private lessons in French; his friend Juliusz Kydryński,, a fellow actor, had introduced him to the Szkocki family, who lived in Dębniki and whose boarder, Mrs. Jadwiga Lewaj, taught the language, which Lolek wanted to learn to enhance his literary studies. In the midst of this blizzard of activity, Karol Wojtyła continued to write poetry and worked as a volunteer librarian.

  In late September 1938, just before beginning his studies at the Jagiellonian, Karol Wojtyła had taken a compulsory six-day military training course in the Academic Legion. On November 28, as Poland began to accelerate its preparations for the trial ahead, he received a letter from the county subprefect of Wadowice, exempting him from active military duty because of his studies. In February 1939, Academic Legion cadets were ordered to take physical education on Tuesdays and Fridays, from 8 to 9 P.M. at a local gym.

  The shadows over the Second Polish Republic were growing longer. The previous fall, Jerzy Kluger had left his university engineering studies in Warsaw after a month. An outbreak of violent anti-Semitism at the university drove him back to Wadowice, and his family hoped to be able to send him to England for studies.104 Lolek and his friends, already striking in their lateadolescent seriousness, became even more so. In April 1939, on Holy Thursday, he went to Wawel Cathedral to watch Archbishop Sapieha conduct the ancient ritual of the washing of feet, in commemoration of Jesus’ service to his disciples at the Last Supper. In May he went on a student pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Madonna at Częstochowa, where parallels between the Swedish “Deluge” of 1655 and the looming Nazi threat must have been on many minds.

  In mid-June, Lolek passed the two exams that would permit him to continue his matriculation in Polish philology. On June 24, 1939, he and some friends celebrated the successful completion of their first year of university studies with a party in the home of a classmate, Anna Nawrocka. There was wine and a gramophone and some dancing, but conversation was more important to Lolek and, one imagines, to everyone else.105 A splendid university career had begun. The odds that it would continue worsened as the summer of 1939 wound down. While Wojtyła put in another round of training with the Academic Legion (a photo of the period shows him with a rifle at “present arms,” looking distinctly uncomfortable106), Poland’s allies hesitated and dithered. The German army intensified its preparations for “Case White.” And a hitherto unimaginable negotiation took place in Moscow between Europe’s two totalitarian giants.

  A SON OF FREE POLAND

  Recollections of the early lives of men and women who rise to greatness are always subject to a kind of retrospective filtration by friends and associates. The temptation to find previews of later qualities and accomplishments in youthful characteristics and successes is often irresistible. But every available piece of evidence from his contemporaries suggests that Karol Wojtyła was in fact a model son, student, and friend.

  His intellectual gifts were acknowledged by all; he learned quickly what it took others hours to master.107 He wore his success lightly. There is no record of him provoking jealousies among his peers, in part, perhaps, because he always seemed available to help others work their way through the material they found difficult.108 He grew up in a culture where piety was regarded as normal, and if he seemed even more pi
ous than others his age, this was not regarded as aberrant, only admirable.

  Lolek was in no sense a grind. He had the normal social life of an adolescent of his time and place, with good friends among both boys and girls. An avid sportsman, he would trek for miles in search of better ski runs. He had already shown a contemplative side to his personality, but he had also made and kept friends from virtually every walk of life in his town. With a gift for mimicry, he did impressions of his high school teachers that his friends found irresistibly funny.109 He had adjusted well to the demanding environment of a major university and a large, culturally assertive city.

  His affection and respect for his widower-father were powerful magnets that gave a basic orientation to his moral compass. To some, the captain may have seemed a man who bore the tragedies life had thrust upon him with stoic resignation. The moral lesson the son learned from the father was not Stoic, however, but Christian—the lesson of suffering transformed by faith. His father’s life was austere, the son would later recall, but austerity for the elder Karol Wojtyła was not simply a matter of the frugality required by living on a small pension.110 It was born of convictions about Christian asceticism, and from the unshakable certainty that the true measure of a man was not his wealth but his character.