Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The key date was September 17, 1939. While the French huddled fearfully behind the Maginot Line, paralyzed by memories of the First World War, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. Displaying that delicate moral sensibility for which Soviet diplomacy was always noted, the deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Potemkin, summoned Polish ambassador Wacław Grzybowski to the Kremlin to inform him that “the Polish-German War has revealed the internal bankruptcy of the Polish State.” Thus the Soviet Union was obliged to intervene on behalf of “the kindred Ukrainian and Byelorussian people who live on Polish territory.”19 That Stalin had something in mind beyond ethnic peacekeeping was made immediately clear when advancing Soviet forces began shooting the senior Polish officers they captured, a grim preview of the Katyn Forest massacre of May 1940, in which the NKVD, predecessor to the KGB, murdered more than 10,000 Polish officers in cold blood, decapitating the future leadership of an independent Polish military.20

  On the night of September 17–18, the Polish government fled by car across the Czeremosz River into Romania, accompanied by Cardinal Hlond, the Primate. The next day, the commander-in-chief of the Polish military, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, followed suit, intending to prosecute the war from France. The result was that no general surrender order was ever issued to Polish troops, and no such surrender ever took place. Warsaw held out until September 27, conceding only when the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht’s artillery had destroyed the city’s water supply and food stocks were gone. A tenacious and fierce Polish underground resistance, linked to the legitimate Polish government that eventually re-formed itself in London, immediately commenced.21 On October 5, Hitler reviewed German troops at a victory parade in Warsaw. The resistance had planted enough explosives on the reviewing platform to kill the Führer and his entire entourage. The plot failed when a German order removed from the scene the man responsible for detonating the charge.22

  The fourth partition of Poland had taken place. The Polish state was, once again, extinguished. Its people began a desperate struggle for survival. It was an objective their Nazi captors were determined to deny them.

  “POLAND WILL BE ERASED”

  Western histories of the Second World War usually focus on the Battle of Britain, the North African and Italian campaigns, D-Day, and the Allied armies’ march to the Rhine and beyond as “the story” of World War II, but a persuasive case can be made that east central and eastern Europe were the pivots of the war in Europe. More German casualties were inflicted on the eastern front than in the west, and without such depletions of manpower, the war in the west would certainly have unfolded differently. The centrality of Poland in the continental struggle and the Nazis’ own crazed racial theories led to a German occupation of Poland marked by unparalleled brutality. Rousseau’s famous charge to the Poles—“If you cannot prevent your enemies from swallowing you whole, at least you must do what you can to prevent them from digesting you”23—was tested as never before.

  Poland’s eastern lands were absorbed into the Soviet Union, while central and western Poland were divided into two spheres of German occupation. Parts of Poland, including Wadowice, were incorporated into the Third Reich. The remainder was styled the “General Gouvernement” and placed under the control of Hans Frank, who took up residence in the royal palace on the Wawel, in Kraków. The rule of law, or anything remotely resembling the rule of law, ceased to exist, and a reign of terror ensued.

  Frank, a gangster who fancied himself an intellectual, entered Wawel Castle through a portal bearing the Latin inscription Si Deus Nobiscum Quis Contra Nos [If God is with us, who can be against us?]. From the residence of Poland’s kings he dispatched instructions to his subordinates designed to demonstrate to the Poles that God, with them or not, was an irrelevancy:

  The Pole has no rights whatsoever. His only obligation is to obey what we tell him. He must be constantly reminded that his duty is to obey.

  A major goal of our plan is to finish off as speedily as possible all troublemaking politicians, priests, and leaders who fall into our hands. I openly admit that some thousands of so-called important Poles will have to pay with their lives, but you must not allow sympathy for individual cases to deter you in your duty, which is to ensure that the goals of National Socialism triumph and that the Polish nation is never again able to offer resistance.

  Every vestige of Polish culture is to be eliminated. Those Poles who seem to have Nordic appearances will be taken to Germany to work in our factories. Children of Nordic appearance will be taken from their parents and raised as German workers. The rest? They will work. They will eat little. And in the end they will die out. There will never again be a Poland.24

  In Hans Frank’s General Gouvernement, the only penalties for “crimes” or resistance were immediate death or sentence to a concentration camp—and a “crime” could include failing to step off the sidewalk for a passing German patrol.25 The people were to survive on a 900-calorie-per-day diet. Secondary and higher education were shut down. Poles would only be taught to count to one hundred and to read enough to obey simple instructions. Participation in Polish cultural activities was a capital offense. Kraków’s great Słowacki Theater was renamed the Staatstheater and reserved for German use. Performance of the works of Chopin and Szymanowski was forbidden. The Germans systematically demolished libraries and other repositories of Poland’s memory.26 In Kraków, the statue of the national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, in the Old Town market square was destroyed, as was the monument to the Polish-Lithuanian defeat of the Teutonic Knights in 1410. Wit Stwosz’s colossal wood-carved altarpiece in St. Mary’s Church was disassembled and taken to Nuremberg.

  The Catholic Church became a particular target of Poland’s Nazi masters, who understood its role as the historic custodian of the national culture and identity. Decapitating Polish society necessarily involved decapitating the Church. Before the war, the Church had prospered, owning more than a million acres of land, as well as rectories and convents, hospitals and orphanages, small industrial farms and handicraft industries. Twenty million Roman Catholics had worshiped in 5,100 parishes, served by 11,300 priests and almost 17,000 nuns. Now, the Catholic Church in Poland would show that it knew how to suffer.

  The Polish nation’s view of the Church was indelibly marked by the sacrifices of its clergy during the war. In addition to innumerable laity, 3,646 Polish priests were imprisoned in concentration camps, of whom 2,647 were killed; and 1,117 nuns were imprisoned, of whom 238 were executed and 25 died from other causes. The Dachau concentration camp outside Munich became the world’s largest presbytery, housing at one time or other 1,474 Polish priests and hundreds from other occupied countries. Some 120 Polish priests were subjected to criminal medical experiments. In late 1939, the leading priests of the diocese of Pelplin, the cathedral chapter, were executed en masse. Bishop Michał Kozal of Włocławek died in Dachau in 1943, where Father Hilary Paweł Januszewski, the former Carmelite prior in Kraków, died in 1945 from typhus he contracted while voluntarily serving the camp sick. Another Kraków priest, Piotr Dańkowski, died in Auschwitz with a log tied to his shoulders on Good Friday, 1942. Alfons Maria Mazurek, prior of the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Czerna, died on August 28, 1944, after being taken from the monastery and beaten to death. The Salesian Józef Kowalski was arrested at Karol Wojtyła’s parish in Dębniki in May 1941 and taken to Auschwitz; beaten for refusing to grind rosary beads into the ground with his foot, he was drowned in feces on the night of July 3, 1942.27

  Shortly after arriving in Bydgoszcz at the beginning of the war the Germans began executing priests in reprisal for the Polish army’s resistance. A priest in occupied Poland could be shot for daring to lead a procession around his church without permission. Roadside shrines were wrecked. The German attempt to limit the use of Polish extended even to the confessional; one priest in Chojnice was so severely beaten after hearing confessions in the language of his penitent that he later died in jail.28 Hans Frank closed Wawel Cathedral, later
allowing two Masses a week, celebrated by Father Figlewicz under the supervision of German guards.29 By the end of the war, something on the order of one-third of Poland’s clergy had been murdered outright or had died in concentration camps. And in many cases, it was the most enlightened, assertive priests who perished.30

  Participation in Catholic youth groups was forbidden and the price of defiance was high, particularly when these groups were involved with the Polish resistance. Wanda Połtawska, a young Catholic resistance courier, spent several years as a medical guinea pig in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where diseased baccilli were injected into her bone marrow. There, her resistance continued as she discovered “the suicidal courage of people who could act as they chose today because they [knew] that by tomorrow they would be dead.”31 Others in the resistance were more fortunate. Stefan Wyszyński, a young priest noted for his involvement in labor activism, survived one Gestapo arrest and worked underground during the war years. His nom de guerre during his clandestine ministry in Warsaw was “Sister Cecilia,” as in “Where is Sister Cecilia saying Mass today?”32

  Polish life between 1939 and 1945 had a bizarre, even surreal quality. It was not a question of knowing whether you would be alive next year. Given the arbitrary terror meted out by the occupiers, the question was whether you would be alive tomorrow. The pressure was unrelenting: “they” could make as many mistakes as “they” liked; you could make only one. Criminals once thought that way; three months into the Occupation, virtually every Pole thought like that. The official ration was clearly inadequate for survival, so everyone was by necessity an outlaw, living on the black market. When news of the French collapse before the Wehrmacht reached Poland, suicides took place in Warsaw, Kraków, and the manor houses of the Polish intelligentsia. There would be no help. There would be no spring. A seemingly endless winter had set in. Poland was a nation under ice.33

  THE WORKER

  At the outbreak of the war Karol Wojtyła and his father fled their apartment in Dębniki and, with thousands of other Poles, headed eastward, with a battered suitcase. The roads were filled with refugees, many of them Jews, pushing children in prams, the elderly being helped by their grandchildren. Peasants drove their livestock before them. People prayed, sang, cursed. There was no destination, only a desperate desire to avoid the onrushing Wehrmacht. The elder Wojtyła, weak and in poor health, could occasionally ride in a cart or a truck. Lolek and his father sometimes found themselves in a ditch, trying to take shelter from strafing Luftwaffe aircraft. Passing beyond Tarnów, they made it as far as the San River, some 120 miles from Kraków, before they learned that the Russians had invaded Poland from the east. Kraków, even under Occupation, was preferable to summary execution or deportation by the advancing Red Army. Kraków, even under the heel of Hans Frank, was home. They reversed course and walked back.34

  On their return, they saw the swastika flag flying from Wawel Castle’s San-domierz rampart. In the weeks the Wojtyłas had been in flight, the Germans had imposed themselves with ruthless efficiency. Special shops Nur für Deutsche, “For Germans Only,” monopolized meat, fresh vegetables, the best bread, the only butter. Leaving the “catacomb” apartment in Dębniki, Lolek discovered that, in frigid temperatures, Poles were forming lines to buy black bread at 4 A.M.35 In its first stages, though, the Occupation could seem more a distraction than a reign of terror to a high-spirited young man. In mid-September, Wojtyła wrote to Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, still in Wadowice:

  “Vita Cracoviensis.” [The Kraków life.] Just think, think! It consists of standing in line for bread, or (rare) expeditions to find sugar. Ha! And also of a black longing for coal—and of reading. For us, life [once] consisted of evenings on Długa Street, of refined conversation, of dreams and longings. We dreamt away many an evening until midnight or beyond, but now…36

  In his letter to Kotlarczyk, Lolek also mentioned his attempts to find a part-time job at the Słowacki Theater. The German expropriation of that grand playhouse for their exclusive use quickly ended any hope of openly continuing his acting career. That was a blow, but the brutal face of the terror showed itself in earnest in early November 1939.

  According to ancient custom, the Jagiellonian University had opened its doors in October. Some of its professors, perhaps sensing what was coming, began teaching even before the school year officially began. Students, including Karol Wojtyła, duly registered for their fall courses. It would be a short-lived semester.

  A lecture for all professors and academic staff by SS Obersturmbannführer Müller was announced for the morning of November 6 in the Szujski Hall of the university’s Collegium Novum. Some, suspecting a trap, absented themselves, but 184 academics attended, and when Müller entered the lecture hall escorted by a squad of soldiers they knew their fate was sealed. In what SS records referred to as the Sonderaktion Krakau [the Kraków Special Action], the entire group, which included eighteen current or former rectors and fifty deans or assistant deans, was summarily arrested and shipped off to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where many eventually perished. The Nazi strategy of cultural decapitation had arrived in force at east central Europe’s second oldest university.37 After the faculty arrests, the Germans looted the Jagiellonian, wrecking libraries and destroying laboratories.38 Four days before the arrest of the professors, Lolek had written Mieczysław Kotlarczyk about his hopes for an “Athenian Poland,” made “more perfect than Athens” by the “boundless immensity of Christianity.”39 That exuberant youthful vision now had to be pursued by clandestine means.

  By the beginning of 1942 the Jagiellonian University, in a defiant act of self-preservation, had reconstituted itself underground, operating clandestinely with five faculties, including all the departments that had been in operation before the war. During the three years of the university’s clandestine existence, 136 professors risked instant death by teaching 800 students (including Karol Wojtyła), often at night in private homes. The atmosphere of the times was captured in a memoir by Juliusz Kydryński,, whose family risked arrest constantly by opening their apartment to clandestine scholarship:

  “One of the meetings we had arranged was due to take place in an hour. The chairs were all arranged in the room for about thirty people. Then the Gestapo arrived. They were asking for somebody whom we probably knew and they saw all the chairs. My mother said we were preparing for a party. This seemed to satisfy them and they left. But that was a very close thing…If the Gestapo had arrived when there were people there…I would not be speaking today.”40

  Meanwhile, life had to be sustained at a basic physical level. Mieczysław Maliński, another Dębniki resident whom Karol Wojtyła would soon meet, described the normal conditions of life in Kraków under the Occupation in these grim terms:

  “…Police round-ups, deportation to camps and forced labor in Germany or some other place unknown, beating up by SS men, death shooting in the street—all these things were part of daily life…. Shots were frequently heardat night after curfew hours, when the police arrested people who were caught walking the streets without passes, and fired at any who did not stop when challenged. We were hungry for five years without a break, and each winter we were desperately cold.”41

  In the Wojtyła apartment, potatoes were the staple of the diet, dressed up with a bit of onion and margarine.42 In addition to keeping fed, it was just as urgent for Karol Wojtyła to get an Arbeitskarte, a work card, that would permit him to stay in Kraków. Every able-bodied male between fourteen and sixty in the General Gouvernement had to have a job. The alternatives were to be shipped off to a concentration camp or to be summarily executed. For the first year of the war Lolek worked as a store messenger for a restaurant. It was relatively light work, and it suited Wojtyła’s interest in continuing his education, his theatrical career, and the cultural resistance activities in which he was becoming involved. While others were “dying of boredom,” he wrote Kotlarczyk at the end of 1939, “I have surrounded myself with books, dug in with Arts
and Sciences.”43 He also intensified his study of French.44 At the same time, he read and reread Conrad, Słowacki, Mickiewicz, and Wyspiański on his own, complemented by the Bible, especially the Hebrew Scriptures.45

  In the fall of 1940, as the Nazis began to interpret their work rules ever more stringently, Karol Wojtyła began almost four years as a manual laborer for the Solvay chemical company. For a year, he walked every day from the apartment in Dębniki to and from the Solvay quarry at Zakrzówek—a thirty-minute hike, but that was no small matter in sub-zero winter weather when he and his friend and fellow quarryman, Juliusz Kydryński,, had to make the trek with petroleum jelly smeared over their faces to keep their skin from freezing.

  The Zakrzówek quarry, a pit hundreds of feet deep, mined limestone, essential for the production of soda in the Solvay chemical plant located in another Kraków suburb, Borek Fałęcki. Throughout the harsh winter of 1940–1941, in which temperatures dipped to –22° Fahrenheit (–30° Celsius), Lolek shoveled limestone into miniature railway cars at the bottom of the pit, occasionally working as a brakeman on the trains. In the spring he received a kind of promotion, as an assistant to Franciszek łabuś, a veteran dynamiter. łabuś took a liking to the young man whose previous experience hadn’t prepared him for the rigors of the quarry and offered Lolek some career advice. “Karol, you should be a priest,” he told the novice blaster. “You have a good voice and will sing well; then you’ll be all set.”46