Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  In the following months, he penned two more biblically inspired dramas. Job, written in the spring of 1940, was a meditation on justice in history, provoked by the experience of the Occupation. The play’s narrative line follows the biblical story rather closely, with Job’s circumstance representing Poland’s suffering under the Nazi jackboot—an adaptation of nineteenth-century Polish Romanticism and its identification of dismembered Poland as the suffering “Christ of nations.”71

  In the summer of 1940, the twenty-year-old Wojtyła, who had been reading extensively in the Hebrew Bible, completed Jeremiah. The play’s inspiration was biblical, but the setting was late sixteenth-century Poland, where the Counter-Reformation Jesuit preacher Piotr Skarga was contending for the nation’s soul. Wojtyła paralleled Skarga’s fierce sermons on national reform with Jeremiah’s biblical prophecies, calling the Kingdom of Judah to repentance. Jeremiah, which marked a literary advance over Job, mixed historical time with “dramatic time” and ingeniously wove biblical material together with Skarga’s preaching and his own script.72 Thematically, Jeremiah continued the young playwright’s exploration of the why of Poland’s suffering.73

  Another aspect of Karol’s intensified dramatic activity involved the famous Polish actor and director Juliusz Osterwa, whom the Nazis had forbidden to practice his craft. Like Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, Osterwa thought of theater as a vocation as well as a career. During the Second Polish Republic he had founded a theater company, Reduta, to bring the classics of the Polish stage to a mass audience. The members of the company lived as a community, in an almost monastic style, and were deeply committed to the ideals expressed in nineteenth-century Polish Romantic literature.74 Meeting Osterwa through Juliusz Kydryński,, Wojtyła soon found himself involved in various of the older actor’s projects, including fresh translations of the world’s dramatic masterpieces into contemporary Polish. Karol’s contribution to this endeavor reflected the quality of the classical education he had received in Wadowice. He prepared a fresh translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus from the original Greek, while Osterwa was working on Antigone and Hamlet.75 Osterwa came to at least one performance that Karol and his friends staged in the Kydryński,s’ third-floor apartment at 10 Felicjanek Street: Act Two of Stefan Żeromski’s The Quail, an examination of love and duty, with Wojtyła in the role of a country teacher and Danuta Michałowska as the teacher’s wife coveted by another man, played by Kydryński,.76

  Osterwa seemed to lose interest in Kydryński,, Wojtyła, and their friends after they produced The Quail. Perhaps the difficulties of performing in an ersatz theater before an audience of thirty people dampened the veteran actor’s enthusiasm for underground drama. There also seem to have been artistic tensions between the youngsters and the older man. By the time Osterwa had left Kraków, Karol confessed to being “not as impressed by him” as he used to be. Osterwa’s celebrity was getting in the way of the dramatic exploration of the interior life to which Karol and his young colleagues were committed.77

  Osterwa’s departure left a bit of a void, but that would be more than filled in July 1941 when, a month after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Mieczysław Kotlarczyk came to live in Kraków. Life in Wadowice (which, like Oswięcim, renamed “Auschwitz,” had been absorbed into the Third Reich) had become too dangerous for so visible an intellectual as Kotlarczyk. So he and his wife, Zofia, moved into the Wojtyła apartment in Dębniki.* Although Kotlarczyk worked as a tram driver, what he burned to do was put his ideas about a “theater of the word” into practice. This new form of drama was an artistic experiment, but he also saw that it could be “a protest against the extermination of the Polish nation’s culture on its own soil, a form of underground resistance movement against the Nazi Occupation.”79 As the Pope later recalled, what came to be known as the Rhapsodic Theater “was born in that room,” lent by Karol Wojtyła to the refugee Kotlarczyks.80

  The key organizational meeting was held on August 22, 1941, in the Dębowski family’s apartment at 7 Komorowskiego Street. Kotlarczyk laid out his ideas that afternoon before a group that included Karol Wojtyła, Halina Królikiewicz (who had arrived in Kraków the previous autumn with cabbages and potatoes as barter for rent81), Tadeusz Kwiatkowski (Halina’s future husband, who was involved in underground literary publishing), Juliusz Kydryński,, Danuta Michałowska, the host couple with their daughters Krystyna and Irena, and several others. Kotlarczyk made it clear that this would be very much his enterprise, run according to his principles. He could be stubborn, even fanatical about those principles—over half a century later, Danuta Michałowska, with the affection of mature friendship, would say that “Savonarola was nothing” compared to Mieczysław Kotlarczyk pursuing his vision.82 No doubt that was part of the reason that he attracted disciples. But his visionary’s insistence on doing it his way led to a rift. Kotlarczyk’s ideas about the artistic path to pursue differed widely from Juliusz Kydryński,’s, and these two strong and stubborn men soon came to a parting of the ways.83

  With Kydryński, gone, Kotlarczyk quickly whittled down the August 22 group to the players who would be the core of the Rhapsodic Theater during the war years: the director himself, Krystyna Dębowska, Halina Królikiewicz, Danuta Michałowska, and Karol Wojtyła.84 Tadeusz Ostaszewski, a sculptor who was Krystyna’s fiancé, became the group’s stage designer. With the exception of Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, they were all in their late teens or early twenties.

  Rehearsals were held Wednesdays and Saturdays, in the late afternoon between the end of work and the beginning of curfew. The young actors often rehearsed in the “catacomb” apartment in Dębniki, sometimes by candlelight when the power had been cut off. On their way to Tyniecka, 10, they walked past posters announcing an ever-increasing list of executions by firing squads, their virtually certain fate if they had been caught.85

  Their first production took place in the apartment of the Szkocki family, who had befriended Karol Wojtyła during his first year at the Jagiellonian and to whom he had been introduced by Juliusz Kydryński,. Fittingly enough, the play was Słowacki’s King-Spirit, which they performed four times, beginning on November 1, 1941—All Saints’ Day in the liturgical calendar. Karol Wojtyła took the role of King Bolesław the Bold, who ordered the murder of St. Stanisław. Supported by Kotlarczyk (but criticized by others), Wojtyła gave the role of the villain a new twist, playing the king as if he were a man preparing himself for confession years after his crime.86

  The Rhapsodists’ program picked up speed in 1942–1943. Another Słowacki poem, Beniowski, was given one performance in February. This was followed in March by a poetry cycle written by Jan Kasprowicz, Hymns, which the troupe interpreted as a Passion oratorio. Wyspiański’s Hour, a production assembled from pieces of three Wyspiański plays, was performed four times, once before Juliusz Osterwa, who pronounced himself highly impressed. A similar montage of poems, Norwid’s Hour, was given three performances, and Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz was produced twice. The last Rhapsodic Theater production in which Karol Wojtyła participated was Słowacki’s Samuel Zborowski; he played the title role of a sixteenth-century Polish nobleman rebelling against the establishment of his day. The premiere was on March 16, 1943, and the play was performed three times.87

  Given the circumstances under which they worked—which included the necessity of constantly changing rehearsal and performance sites to avoid arousing Gestapo suspicions—the Rhapsodic Theater’s productivity during the Occupation was remarkable: seven productions in twenty-two formal performances and more than one hundred rehearsals, all of them clandestine. Three more productions were prepared but never performed, including Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and an adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.88 For the members of this unique troupe, underground theatrical activism was not a matter of filling time that would otherwise have been lost to boredom. The young actors of the Rhapsodic Theater “certainly” thought of themselves as involved in a resistance movement, according to Danuta Michałowska and Halina Kwiatko
wska.89 And their purpose was equally clear: “to save our culture from the Occupation” and to help restore the nation’s soul, which was a precondition to its political resurrection.90

  In addition to the lifelong friendships that were formed, the Rhapsodic Theater helped forge the man Karol Wojtyła would become in several ways.

  Kotlarczyk’s rigorous direction honed his articulation, his timing, and his sense of connection with an audience. A young man who could calmly continue a clandestine performance of Pan Tadeusz while Nazi megaphones blasted their propaganda through the streets below was likely to be able to handle himself publicly in virtually any dramatic situation.91 The themes explored in Kotlarczyk’s “inner theater,” which deepened Wojtyła’s appropriation of the Polish Romantic tradition while stripping it of some of its more messianic excesses, also left their imprint. Słowacki’s prominence in the work of the wartime Rhapsodic Theater was not accidental. The poet who sought to remake Poland through the power of Słowo, “the word,” found a posthumous vehicle for his hopes in Kotlarczyk’s conviction that the power of drama lay in the spoken and received word, not in theatrics. This left a deep and abiding impression on Karol Wojtyła, whose literary instincts had already inclined him to the view that “the word” could alter what the world of power thought were unalterable facts, if that word were proclaimed clearly, honestly, and forcefully enough.

  This Christian subtext to the Rhapsodic Theater, which reflected the New Testament image of the world created through the Word, the Logos who was with God and who was God (see John 1.1–3), also found expression in Kotlarczyk’s understanding of theater as ritual. In the world according to Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, one did not simply go to the theater to be entertained. Rather, Kotlarczyk deliberately crafted the dramatic method of the Rhapsodists to evoke sentiments of transcendence and patriotism in a quasi-liturgical atmosphere.

  The word of truth, publicly, indeed almost liturgically, proclaimed was the antidote the Rhapsodic Theater sought to apply to the violent lies of the Occupation. The tools for fighting evil included speaking truth to power. That was what Kotlarczyk and his Rhapsodic Theater believed, and lived. That belief and that experience made an indelible impression on Karol Wojtyła, who would not forget when, on a different kind of stage, he would confront another totalitarian power in the future.92

  Some have suggested that, confronted by the horror of Nazi-occupied Poland, Karol Wojtyła retreated into a religious quietism.93 In the light of the evidence, it is clear that he had a decision to make. Some young Poles chose armed resistance or clandestine sabotage. The evidence makes clear that Karol Wojtyła deliberately chose the power of resistance through culture, through the power of the word, in the conviction that the “word” (and in Christian terms, the Word) is that on which the world turns. Those who question the choice he made are also questioning that judgment about the power of the Word and words.

  REMORALIZING POLITICS

  The Rhapsodic Theater was allied to a broader movement of clandestine cultural resistance known as UNIA [Union], of which Karol Wojtyła was a member. UNIA was founded in 1940 through a merger of three preexisting underground organizations, complemented by recruits from the nowproscribed Catholic youth groups and from the nationwide Catholic Action movement.94 The new organization was structured territorially and included a Kraków district organization. UNIA was built by its members recruiting or recommending new members. After scrutiny by local UNIA leaders, new members took a solemn oath committing themselves to the organization’s principles and to the rules of conspiracy.

  UNIA tried to apply Christian moral principles and Catholic social doctrine to public life at a time when there was, officially, no “public life” for Poles. Its name, “Union,” expressed its vision of postwar Poland as a nation in which differences of ethnicity, religion, and social class would be overcome through two shared convictions: politics and economics should be guided by the universal moral law, the only legitimate source of public authority, and free individuals should make the common good a priority in their public lives.

  In one sense, UNIA was an attempt to articulate a political philosophy capable of disciplining the talent for divisiveness that had made the history of Polish politics such a bedlam, leaving the Polish nation so vulnerable to its enemies. In another respect, UNIA was an underground effort to lay the foundations of a new Polish state that would embody in its laws, economy, and public ethos the communitarian themes of Catholic social doctrine developed by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI: support for the family as the basic unit of society; the anti-totalitarian principle of subsidiarity, according to which decision making should be left at the lowest level possible in society (rather than absorbed by an omni-competent state); and “self-government,” UNIA’s term for Catholic personalism and its stress on the inalienable dignity of the individual man or woman created in the image and likeness of God. Those principles, UNIA leaders thought, were a solid foundation for a democratic state, and a barrier against both the radical individualism of one stream of modern political thought and the totalitarian demolition of individuality.

  UNIA had a military component, which at full strength numbered some 20,000 members, many of whom saw combat as part of the underground Polish Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. UNIA also sponsored another dangerous form of anti-Nazi activism. Its Council to Help the Jews, code-named “Żegota,” delivered false identification papers to some 50,000 Jews trying to escape Hitler’s Final Solution, hid some 2,500 Jewish children from Nazi manhunters in Warsaw, and provided regular financial support to approximately 4,000 persons.

  UNIA, however, was primarily an instrument of ideological and cultural resistance to the Nazi attempt to erase Poland from the map of history. It maintained an underground Institute of Central Europe for research purposes, and sponsored a number of “columns,” attempts to organize and catechize the worlds of labor, culture, youth, and women. The UNIA-sponsored Cultural Union supported a wide range of cultural resistance activities. In addition to lectures and discussions, it published an underground newspaper, Culture of Tomorrow, and a Unionist Library Series to replace what the Nazis were systematically destroying. UNIA also supported a number of underground theaters, including the Rhapsodic Theater, Mieczysław Kotlarczyk having been a member of UNIA for some time.

  UNIA was a pioneering effort to build what a later generation would call “civil society” from under the rubble of totalitarianism. Its principles of “self-government” and “union” were an attempt to marry the Polish passion for freedom (“Nothing about us without us”) to a Catholic-inspired communitarian concept of the common good. History, in the person of Stalin, would determine that UNIA’s dreams for postwar Poland were dashed. Its communitarian ideas about a just modern society and a reconstituted European community remained part of the intellectual architecture of Karol Wojtyła for life.95

  SEMINARIAN IN HIDING

  Death was an ever-present reality in occupied Kraków. Before his twenty-first birthday Karol Wojtyła had seen a lot of it. He had witnessed violent death on the refugees’ road to Tarnów. His professors, men of culture and distinction, had been summarily arrested and carted off to concentration camps. The Gestapo had kidnapped the parish priests of Dębniki, many of whom would be subsequently martyred. Kraków’s historic and vibrant Jewish life was being systematically destroyed, as Jews were herded into a ghetto, where they died by the thousands, dispatched to the extermination camps or sent to the nearby Płaszów labor camp—where some were saved by being named on what the world would eventually know as “Schindler’s list.”

  Although he had become progressively weaker, the elder Karol Wojtyła, “the captain,” was an anchor for his son in these troubled waters. Lolek had his friends, his underground studies, his clandestine theatrical life. He had found a new spiritual mentor in Jan Tyranowski. But his father was the sole surviving member of his immediate family and the last living link to an almost unimaginably simpler past. Father and so
n continued to share the apartment on Tyniecka Street, and the older Wojtyła attended his son’s clandestine plays and dramatic readings.96 When Lolek began to work at the Zakrzówek quarry, he walked back to town with Juliusz Kydryński,, whose mother gave him a late afternoon dinner and then sent something home with him for the captain, who had been bedridden since Christmas 1940.

  February 18, 1941, began like any other day during this period. After working at the quarry Karol stopped, as usual, at the Kydryński,s to pick up dinner and some medicine for his father. He hurried back to the Dębniki apartment through the bitter cold, accompanied by Juliusz Kydryński,’s sister Maria, who would heat up the captain’s meal. Entering “the catacomb,” Maria turned right into the small kitchen, while Karol went to his father, whose room was at the end of the dark hallway on the left. The captain was dead.

  Maria Kydryńska remembers the son in tears, blaming himself for not being present when his father died. He then ran to St. Stanisław Kostka for a priest, who came and gave the deceased man the last rites of the Church. Lolek spent the entire night on his knees beside his father’s body, praying and talking with Juliusz Kydryński,, who had come to be with him; the orphaned young man later recalled that, despite his friend’s presence, “I never felt so alone….”97

  Father Figlewicz said the funeral Mass on February 22 at the Rakowice cemetery, in whose military section Karol Wojtyła was buried on another bitterly cold day. The Kydryński,s, concerned about the twenty-year-old orphan living by himself, invited young Karol to stay with them. He accepted, moving back to the Dębniki apartment in the late summer of 1941 when Mieczysław and Zofia Kotlarczyk escaped Wadowice and came to Kraków. Juliusz Kydryński, remembered this as a period of intense reflection for his friend, who would sometimes pray while lying on the floor in a cruciform position.98