Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Lolek also learned from his father that manliness and prayerfulness were not antinomies. Perhaps above all, the captain transmitted to his son an instinct for paternity. He would, later, come to understand this in theological terms: the instinct for paternity and the responsibilities of fatherhood were a kind of icon of God and of God’s relationship to the world. Fatherhood meant rejecting the prison of selfishness; fatherhood meant being “conquered by love.” That love compelled one to “give birth” in acts of self-giving, as Karol Wojtyła would put these things in the last play he ever wrote.111

  Karol Wojtyła was the son of a particular time, a particular place, and a unique set of relationships. Those who had taught him to love his country, its history, and its literature had also taught him that there was no room for narrowness in the authentic tradition of his fatherland. Rather, the Polish experience as he learned it was a metaphor for the human condition in the twentieth century: the quest for freedom was a universal aspiration. In the pursuit of that aspiration, truth was more powerful than what the world usually regarded as real power. The human spirit, ordered to truth, was the most irresistible of forces. To understand that was to be a son of free Poland.

  He was a young man of whom much was expected in the future, in a career that Karol Wojtyła expected to be focused on language, literature, and the theater. History and, he would insist, Providence, had other plans.

  From the Underground

  The Third Reich vs. the Kingdom of Truth

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

  World War II begins as Germany invades Poland.

  NOVEMBER 6, 1939

  184 Jagiellonian University professors are arrested and deported to Sachsenhausen; Karol Wojtyła begins clandestine studies and underground cultural resistance activities.

  FEBRUARY 1940

  Lolek meets Jan Tyranowski, who introduces him to Carmelite mysticism and the “Living Rosary” youth groups.

  LENT 1940

  Wojtyła writes Job: A Drama from the Old Testament.

  SUMMER 1940

  Wojtyła writes Jeremiah: A National Drama in Three Acts.

  SEPTEMBER 1940

  Karol Wojtyła begins work as a quarryman at the Zakrzówek mine.

  FEBRUARY 18, 1941

  Lolek’s father, the elder Karol Wojtyła, dies.

  MAY 23, 1941

  Wojtyła’s parish priests are arrested by the Gestapo.

  AUGUST 22, 1941

  Mieczysław Kotlarczyk launches the “Rhapsodic Theater.”

  OCTOBER 1941

  Karol Wojtyła begins work at Solvay chemical plant.

  NOVEMBER 1, 1941

  Wojtyła plays King Bolesław the Bold in the first clandestine production of the Rhapsodic Theater, Słowacki’s King-Spirit.

  FALL 1942

  Karol Wojtyła is accepted by the Archdiocese of Kraków as a clandestine seminarian and begins underground studies in philosophy.

  FEBRUARY 29, 1944

  Wojtyła is struck by a German truck and hospitalized.

  APRIL 1944

  Jerzy Zachuta, Wojtyła’s fellow-underground seminarian, is arrested by the Gestapo and shot.

  AUGUST 6, 1944

  Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha begins an underground seminary in his residence.

  JANUARY 1945

  The German Occupation abandons Kraków and the Red Army arrives.

  NOVEMBER 1, 1946

  Karol Wojtyła is ordained a priest by Cardinal Sapieha.

  NOVEMBER 15, 1946

  Father Wojtyła leaves for graduate theological studies in Rome.

  SUMMER 1947

  Wojtyła visits France, Belgium, and Holland.

  JUNE 1948

  Karol Wojtyła completes his first doctorate.

  High atop the Wawel, the hill commanding Poland’s ancient capital, sits the cathedral church of Kraków. To its north is the Old Town, its immense market square dominated by St. Mary’s Church, from whose tower a trumpeter announces every hour of the day. The trumpet call, the solemn hejnał, breaks in mid-note, in memory of a thirteenth-century watchman killed by an arrow in the throat while warning the city of an impending Tartar invasion. To the south is the traditional Jewish quarter, Kazimierz. In the fall of 1939, its residents did not yet know the name Oskar Schindler. West of Kazimierz is Skałka, where St. Stanisław, the first bishop of Kraków, was struck down in 1079 by the sword of King Bolesław the Bold.

  Site of the coronation of Polish kings and burial place of many of the nation’s political, religious, and cultural leaders, Wawel Cathedral has been the magnetic pole of Poland’s emotional life for centuries. It had also witnessed a host of invasions and depredations since construction of the present structure began in 1320. Tartars and Swedes had laid waste the country; the Austrians had stripped the Old Town of its fortifications and walls; occupying powers of varying degrees of ferocity had displaced the kings and queens of Poland from the royal castle, atop the “Polish Zion.” Now, on September 1, 1939, Wawel Cathedral was about to experience something beyond the imagining of those who had worshiped beneath its gothic vault for centuries.

  Karol Wojtyła left his apartment at Tyniecka, 10, in Dębniki early that morning and set out for the cathedral. It was the first Friday of the month and, according to Catholic custom and personal habit, he was going to make his confession to Father Kazimierz Figlewicz and serve Father Figlewicz’s Mass. Entering the cathedral in the morning darkness, he walked past the tomb of King Władysław Jagiełło and the silver casket containing the remains of St. Stanisław. Passing the white marble memorial to Blessed Queen Jadwiga, Jagiełło’s consort and partner in forming the great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he came to the altar in the north nave where Jadwiga’s relics were venerated. Before the altar’s great black crucifix, the young queen was often absorbed in prayer—and from that cross, “according to the traditions of our ancestors” (as an inscription had it), Christ had spoken to Jadwiga about her duty.

  During that early morning Mass, other voices, far less gentle, made their presence known in Wawel Cathedral. First came the high-pitched wail of the warning sirens. They were followed by the chatter of anti-aircraft batteries and the explosions of bombs from Luftwaffe aircraft. The congregants scattered, but Father Figlewicz and his server concluded the Mass, if somewhat more rapidly than usual. Then Karol Wojtyła turned to the young priest who was his spiritual confidant and the keeper of his most personal secrets and said, “I’ve got to go, my father’s at home alone.” As he ran back across the Vistula, Luftwaffe Stukas began strafing the city’s suburbs.

  FORGED IN FIRE

  World War II, which Poles sometimes describe as the war they lost twice, was an unmitigated disaster for Poland. Six million of its citizens, out of a prewar population of 35 million, were killed in combat or murdered, a mortality rate of eighteen percent. The nation was physically decimated. Poland became the site of the greatest slaughters of the Holocaust. And, at the end, another totalitarian power seized control of Poland’s political future.

  The experience of the war was decisive in forming the man who became Pope John Paul II. The war’s horrors and an unexpected encounter during the Occupation with a lay mystic began to shape Karol Wojtyła’s distinctively Carmelite spirituality, which focused on the cross as the center of the Christian life, and indeed the center of human history. It was during the Occupation, and in part because of the Occupation, that his vocational discernment began to bend inexorably toward the priesthood.

  The struggle for moral survival between September 1939 and January 1945 provided young Karol Wojtyła with heroic models for living out that priestly vocation. One of them, the Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe, would sacrifice his life for a fellow prisoner in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz. Another was Adam Stefan Sapieha, the archbishop who had thought it a pity that the brightest young man in Wadowice was going to study philology instead of theology.

  The Occupation gave Karol Wojtyła his most profound experience of the world of man
ual labor. The experience would provide grist for his literary mill, even as it would shape the social doctrine of the Catholic Church throughout the world. And it was during the long, dark night of Occupation that Karol Wojtyła began to experiment with cultural activism, the defense of national cultural identity, as a means of political resistance and liberation—a distinctive approach to the politics of revolution that would alter the course of the twentieth century, forty years later.

  The war was a trial by fire, a six-year period of unspeakable cruelty broken by acts of unimaginable heroism. As John Paul II wrote in 1995, “Half a century later, individuals, families, and peoples still retain memories of those six terrible years: memories of fear, violence, extreme poverty, death; tragic experiences of painful separation, endured in the absence of all security and freedom; recurring traumas brought about by the incessant bloodshed.” The experience of this manmade hell caused some to conclude that life was an absurdity. Karol Wojtyła came to a different conclusion and grew up very fast as a man, a thinker, and a disciple.1

  KILLING FIELDS

  Postwar communist historiography, too often adopted by Western commentators, was given to describing the Second Polish Republic as a buffoon state run by fascist colonels. The truth is more complex.

  Interwar Polish governments treated their political opponents with a heavy-handedness that would be unacceptable in developed democracies today. Yet opposition political parties flourished during the 1920s and 1930s and were in their strongest condition by the time war broke out in 1939. The only exception was the Polish Communist Party. But it was liquidated on orders from Moscow, not by Polish colonels. Government attempts to shackle the press usually failed; the judiciary maintained its independence and justice was generally evenhanded; critics of the government maintained their positions on university faculties.2 The regime, in a word, was not fascist or even semifascist.

  The cultural situation was more difficult. Marshal Piłsudski, a philo-Semite, subscribed to a theory of Polish nationalism in which there was ample room for cultural and religious diversity. Others insisted, often crudely, that a free Poland had to be ethnically Polish and Catholic. Among those holding this view were many members of the rural clergy. Their prejudices were undoubtedly confirmed when the Primate during the interwar years, Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, SDB, deployed a host of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes in a 1936 pastoral letter and wrote that “it is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church.”3 The attitude Wadowice’s priests took toward their Jewish fellow townsmen demonstrates that such sentiments were not universally shared. But anti-Semitism came increasingly to the foreground after Piłsudski’s death. The substantial Ukrainian minority was also heavily pressured in interwar Poland, and political violence was close to the surface of public life.4

  Reborn Poland had its cultural accomplishments as well as its political, ethnic, and religious tensions and discord. Illiteracy was dramatically reduced. The army, in which every young man had to serve, became a great technical training school.5 Polish intellectual life, particularly in philosophy and mathematics, flourished.6 The arts experienced an explosion of creativity. Polish Catholic intellectuals became an independent cultural force by articulating a position that challenged both Polish messianism and Polish chauvinism—a development that would have a considerable impact on the future.7

  Perspective is important here. There was poverty and injustice in interwar Poland, but it cannot bear serious comparison to the wholesale starvation and mass executions that attended the birth and consolidation of the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union. Anti-Semitism was not unique to Poland, as American immigration quotas in the 1930s made clear and as Vichy France later demonstrated. Despite the Poles’ troubles in establishing a stable modern government, they never fell on each other in an orgy of fratricidal slaughter like their Spanish contemporaries. During the Second World War, Poland was the only occupied country in which the Nazis failed to establish even the bare outlines of a collaborationist regime.8 That seems to suggest that for all its difficulties, the Second Polish Republic was something its citizens thought worth defending.

  Poland’s interwar diplomacy had its faults. Its seizure of land from Czechoslovakia while that country was being consumed by the Nazis was a sordid business that also suggested geopolitical woodenheadedness; a Polish-Czechoslovak alliance, pre-Munich, might have set the history of the late 1930s on a different course.9 In the end, though, no diplomacy, however creative, could have saved Poland from its ancient curse—geography.

  Adolf Hitler warned the German army high command in March 1939 that the time had come to resolve the “Polish problem” by military means. On April 1, he decreed that the invasion date would be September 1, and on April 28, he unilaterally abrogated the 1934 Polish-German nonaggression pact. The final decision to invade was taken on May 23, 1939, after the Polish government had refused to buckle under to German demands about incorporating the Free City of Danzig (in Polish, Gdańsk) into the Third Reich, and about the position of German ethnics in Poland.10 These demands were a smokescreen behind which lay a draconian strategic concept: “Danzig is not by any means the main cause of the disagreement,” Hitler conceded privately. “The chief objective is to get new areas for Germany in the east and to control and safeguard new sources of foodstuffs. The question of Poland being spared therefore does not arise.”11

  Within a month of Hitler’s May 23 decision, the Wehrmacht high command had given the Führer the operational plans for “Case White,” the invasion and conquest of Poland. Mobilization orders were dispatched to the Reich railroads on August 15, as Poles celebrated the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary by pilgrimages to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Częstochowa, and elsewhere throughout the country.12

  A week later, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was in Moscow to conclude the nonaggression pact that sealed the Second Polish Republic’s fate while charting its partition. Two ancient animosities now combined under totalitarian auspices. An intensely Catholic country was about to be dismembered by two radically secularist ideologies. Germany’s ancient Drang Nach Osten, the “drive to the East,” met with Stalin’s need for a cushion against what he knew was coming eventually from his putative German “ally.” Meanwhile, Poland’s Western allies dithered. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave belated warnings to the German government that his appeasement at Munich the year before rendered ineffectual from the moment they were dispatched.

  The Polish war plan, “Plan Z,” was not insane. Assuming German thrusts from Silesia and Slovakia and knowing that they could not defeat the Wehrmacht on their own, the Poles created a semicircle of seven army groups along their western and southern frontiers. The idea was to resist the initial attack and then conduct a fighting retreat into Poland’s interior, using the country’s rivers as defensive barriers against the invaders. By this juncture, it was assumed, Britain and France would have invaded Germany from the West, and Wehrmacht forces would have to be withdrawn to meet that mortal threat. Then would come winter and wet weather; the heavily mechanized German forces would bog down; and the Polish army would go over to the offensive, catching the Germans in an east-west pincer between Poland and its Western allies.

  It soon became clear, though, that the large Polish army was unprepared for the rigors of blitzkrieg. The lethal combination of German armor and mechanized infantry and the Luftwaffe’s virtually instantaneous control of Polish airspace made the planned fighting retreat impossible. Poland’s war plan, though brave, was uninformed by the new realities of warfare.13 Moreover, the country’s geography—that vast, flat plain—made it the ideal testing ground for blitzkrieg tactics. Then, of course, the Poles never anticipated the double stab, from west and east, that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact made possible.

  In any event, the failure of Poland’s British and French allies to honor their pledges by striking at Germany on the ground rendered any Polish strategy moot. The agreement with the British and French i
nvolved the Poles holding on for up to two weeks, which would have given the French time to “throw 90 divisions, 2,500 tanks, and 1,400 planes across the virtually undefended Rhine.” The Poles held on for twice that time, but, with the exception of a diversionary attack into the Warndt Forest along the Franco-German frontier, the French army did nothing of strategic significance, “while the RAF confined itself to dropping leaflets on German cities.”14 By leaving Poland to its fate, Great Britain and France lost the best chance they had to end Hitler’s aggression without a world war.

  Despite that betrayal, the Poles contributed mightily to the Allied cause throughout the Second World War. Polish troops fought with the British in Norway and with the British and French in France in the spring of 1940. Poles flying with the RAF were responsible for twelve percent of German losses during the Battle of Britain that fall.15 The Polish II Corps won the fourth and decisive battle for Monte Cassino in Italy. The Polish 1st Armored Division was instrumental in the Allied breakout from Normandy in August 1944 (in the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, Polish units ran into German formations they had fought in the Carpathian Mountains in 1939).16 Polish intelligence, which had been cooperating with the Allies before the war broke out, acquired Germany’s Enigma coding machine and, with what Churchill’s private secretary called “immense courage,” delivered it to the British, for whom it was arguably the intelligence coup of the war, allowing the decryption of German military orders.17 The Poles who fought with the Allies were often dismissively styled as émigrés, particularly after the war. But they were, in truth, Poland torn away from its own soil and its own battlefields. And as such, John Paul II once said, “they constituted the very marrow of the Poland that [was] fighting for the cause of independence: in keeping with the password—For your freedom and ours.”18