Free Down with Big Brother by Michael Dobbs Page A

saw his beloved Kraków as part of a European-wide civilization, in which political boundaries were more or less irrelevant. In Wojtyła’s Europe, the Europe of 966, when Poland was first converted to Christianity, there was no Iron Curtain and no Berlin Wall. Priests, scholars, and ideas traveled freely from one town to another. The pope was convinced that his election was God’s way of reminding Western Europe that Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Bulgars, and even Russians were also part of a much broader Christian civilization.
    Born in 1920, the year Poland defeated Soviet Russia in the “Miracle on the Vistula,” Karol Wojtyła had firsthand experience of family tragedy, backbreaking labor, and political oppression. He had scarcely known his mother, a schoolteacher, who died when he was only six, while giving birth to a stillborn girl. His father, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army, was killed in the opening year of World War II. “At the age of twenty,” Wojtyła later recalled, “I had already lost all the people I loved and even the ones I might have loved, such as my big sister who had died, I was told, six years before my birth.” 183 Psychologists have speculated that the future pope sought compensation for the maternal love he never received in the Marian cult of the Black Madonna.
    As a theological student in Kraków Wojtyła experienced the terror of German occupation. A particularly brutal Nazi gauleiter, Hans Frank, installed himself in the royal Wawel Castle with orders from Hitler to treat the Poles as a slave race. “The standard of living in Poland must be kept low,” Hitler instructed. “The priests will preach what we want them to preach. Their task is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted.” 184 Wojtyła saw Kraków Jews being taken to the death camp at Auschwitz, just a few miles down the road. Polish intellectuals were disposed of in a similar fashion. The Germans put Wojtyła to work, first in a stone quarry and later carrying buckets of lime in a water purification plant. On the night of August 6, 1944, the Gestapo arrested all Polish males between the age of fifteen and fifty in retaliation for the Warsaw uprising. Had they found Wojtyła, they would probably have killed him. Fortunately for the young theologian, he was given shelter by the archbishop of Kraków, Prince Adam Sapieha.
    Wojtyła lived in the residence on Franciscan Street, off and on, for nearlyfifteen years, as both student and archbishop. When he returned in June 1983, as pope, it was as if he were coming home. He greeted the nuns by name and sang and joked with the thousands of young people who waited to greet him in the street outside. “Holy Father, we trust you,” they chanted. “Save Poland.”
    On the last full day of his visit the pope said mass on the Błonie, the vast meadow in front of Wawel Castle. Banners reading “Solidarity Lives” and “There Is No Freedom Without Solidarity” fluttered above the crowd of two million people. Alluding to Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law, the pope urged his listeners never to give up. The nation had been “called to victory,” he declared.
    As he said these words, two million people raised their hands silently in the air in the V for victory sign. An underground Solidarity leader, Eugeniusz Szumiejko, who had managed to escape the police roundup, was standing at the back of the huge throng, on top of an embankment. All of a sudden he saw a sea of black heads submerged in a wave of white fists. 185 It was an awe-inspiring sight, proof that Jaruzelski had been unable to crush the spirit that had given birth to Solidarity. At the end of the mass a large chunk of the crowd set off on foot for Nowa Huta, beneath their Solidarity banners, to see the pope consecrate a new church.
    “ Khodz z namy, ” they chanted, the battle cry of 1970 and 1980. “Come with us. There will be no beatings today.”
    When they reached the site of the