Early life of Pope John Paul II

The early life of Pope John Paul II covers the period in his life from his birth in 1920 to his ordination to the priesthood in 1946.

Karol Wojtyla at 12 years old Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born on 18 May 1920 in Wadowice near the city of Krakow in southern Poland, son of a former officer in the Austrian Habsburg army whose name was also Karol Wojtyla, and Emilia Kaczorowska. According to popular Wadowice legend, Emilia used to tell fellow townsfolk that her Karol would be "a great man one day." As a child Karol was called Lolek by friends and family.

His mother died during childbirth in 1929. On hearing about her death, he composed himself and said, "It was God's will." After Emilia's death, his father, an intensely religious man who did most of the housework, brought up Karol so that he could study. His youth was marked by intensive contacts with the then-thriving Jewish community of Wadowice.

His brother Edmund, also known as Mundek, died of scarlet fever contracted from a patient at the age of 26 in 1932. His only other sibling, a sister, died in infancy before Karol was born.

He practiced sports during his youth, being particularly athletic. He often played football (soccer), as a goalkeeper, and was a supporter of Polish club Cracovia Krakow.

Papal biographer George Weigel recalls that when Karol was around fifteen a young person playfully pointed a gun at him not realizing that it was loaded. On pressing the trigger the gun fired and narrowly missed the target. He would escape from other near death incidents as a young seminarian and later as Pope.

University
In the summer of 1938, Karol Wojtyla and his father left Wadowice and moved to Krakow, the former capital of Poland, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University in the autumn semester. In his freshman year, Wojtyla studied Philology, Polish language and literature, introductory Russian, and Old Church Slavonic. He also took private lessons in French. He worked as a volunteer librarian and did compulsory military training in the Academic Legion. At the end of the 1938-39 academic year, he played Sagittarius in a fantasy-fable, The Moonlight Cavalier, produced by an experimental theatre troupe.

In his youth he was an active person, and learned as many as twelve languages. By the time he was Pope he spoke ten languages fluently: Polish, Slovak, Russian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Ukrainian and English, beside his good knowledge of Ecclesiastical Latin.

The Second World War
In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the country was subsequently occupied by German and Soviet forces. At the outbreak of War, Karol and his father fled eastwards from Krakow with thousands of other Poles. They sometimes found themselves in ditches, taking cover from strafing Luftwaffe aircraft. After walking 120 miles, they learned of the Russian invasion of Poland and were obliged to return to Krakow. In November, 184 academics of the Jagiellonian University were arrested and the university suppressed. All able-bodied males had to have a job.

In the first year of the war Karol worked as a messenger for a restaurant. This light work enabled him to continue his education and theatrical career and in acts of cultural resistance. He also intensified his study of French. From the autumn of 1940 Karol worked for almost four years as a manual labourer in a limestone quarry, and was well paid. His father died in 1941 because of a heart attack. In 1942, he entered the underground seminary run by Cardinal Sapieha, the archbishop of Krakow. B'nai B'rith and other authorities have testified that he helped Jews find refuge from the Nazis.

On 29 February 1944, Karol was walking home from work at the quarry when he was knocked down by a German truck. The German officers tending the injured Wojtyla, and the decision to commandeer a passing truck for use as an ambulance for the unconscious patient, is in sharp contrast to the harshness normally expected from the occupying forces during this period. He spent two weeks in hospital and suffered severe concussion, numerous cuts and a shoulder injury. This accident and his survival seemed to Wojtyla a confirmation of his priestly vocation. In August 1944, the Warsaw uprising began, and the Gestapo swept the city of Krakow on 6 August, "Black Sunday", rounding up young men to avoid a similar uprising there. Wojtyla escaped by hiding behind a door as the Gestapo searched the house he lived in, and escaped to the Archbishop's residence, where he stayed until after the war.

On the night of 17 January 1945, the Germans quit the city. The seminarians reclaimed the old seminary, which was in ruins. Wojtyla and another seminarian volunteered for the odious task of chopping up and carting away piles of frozen excrement from the lavatories. In the same month of that year, Wojtyla personally helped a 14 year old Jewish refugee girl named Edith Zierer who had run away from a Nazi labor camp in Częstochowa. Zierer was attempting to reach her family in Krakow but had collapsed from cold and exhaustion on a train platform in Jędrzejw. No one helped but Wojtyla who approached her. Wojtyla gave Zierer some hot tea caca and food, personally carried her to a train and accompanied her to Krakow. Zierer credits Wojtyla for saving her life that day. In the chaos of post-war Poland they became separated and Zierer would not hear of her benefactor again until she read that he was elected as the Pope in 1978.