FOR KAROL WOJTYLA it had been a considerable journey, for the papacy a much longer one. On 13 April 1986 Pope John Paul II crossed the Tiber and was driven to the nearby Great Roman synagogue. It was more than seventeen years since Wojtyla had entered the synagogue in the Kazimierz section of Cracow and stood quietly throughout the service. No Pope had ever entered this building or any other synagogue in the nearly two thousand years of Roman Catholicism. Only John XXIII during the 1960s had come close, for while driving he ordered his car to stop outside the Temple, got out and blessed a bemused congregation of Jews leaving the Sabbath service.
Wojtyla’s passage to this historic moment in 1986 had been far from tranquil. Immediately following the end of the First World War the virus of anti-Semitism erupted again in Eastern Europe. There had been numerous pogroms throughout the region. Poland was no different. In 1919, eighty were killed in Vilna, a further seventy in Lvov and within the province where the future Pope was born 500 were slaughtered. Nineteen twenty, the year of Wojtyla’s birth in Wadowice, was not only marked by fine parades for Marshal Pilsudski in Warsaw.
The peasant and tenant farmers of Wadowice were no different from other Poles: they were unremittingly hostile to Jews, influenced by local priests who were no more enlightened than their parishioners. The contention, nearly 2,000 years old, that the Jews were directly responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, was central to this hatred. Added to that came envy, for although the majority of Jews were poor, even those obliged to live in the shtetls – Jewish villages – enjoyed a higher standard of living than the Catholic peasants. At the time of Karol Wojtyla’s childhood many Polish peasants still believed that Jews stole and murdered Christian children to mix their blood with matzo meal for the Passover ritual meal. Although Jews represented a small minority, around nine per cent, of the Polish population this did nothing to ease the prejudice.
Barred from owning land, they found many other outlets for their natural talents and abilities. They managed the great estates for the Polish nobility, thus ensuring the peasants regarded them as natural enemies. They also became lawyers, merchants, artisans, and members of the professional class. In Wadowice during Wojtyla’s childhood they acquired forty per cent of the shops through talent and hard work yet were only twenty per cent of the population: this created more envy and anti-Semitism. Many Catholic families had Jewish landlords, yet another frequent running sore.
The third-floor apartment rented by the Wojtyla family was in a building owned by a Jewish family and the apartment next door was occupied by the Beer family, also Jewish. Regina ‘Ginka’ Beer became a close friend of Karol’s and his first stage appearance as a budding actor was as her leading man. Yet, contrary to the mythmakers of the Vatican Press Office, Wojtyla’s childhood in Wadowice was indeed exposed to institutionalised anti-Semitism. Close friendships with Jewish families like the Beers did not blind Karol Wojtyla to the realities of Jewish life but until the day he stood before his overwhelmingly Jewish audience he had never confronted or condemned anti-Semitism.
The feast of the Assumption is celebrated in mid August at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska and Wojtyla’s surviving contemporaries are happy to talk about it. They are less forthcoming, indeed they are silent, on some of the events that occurred at Kalwaria during Holy Week, events that Wojtyla also attended regularly throughout his pre-papal life. Easter at Kalwaria was a time of acute danger for any Jew living in the surrounding areas. Jews learned through bitter and violent experiences to ensure, if they could afford it, that they had food and other necessities to last for several weeks. To go out, particularly alone, was extremely dangerous at this time. There would be anti-Jewish riots, their homes and their businesses would be wrecked or set to the torch and all too frequently Jews would be severely beaten and killed. This had been going on long before Hitler and it was destined to continue long after the end of the Third Reich.
For many devout Polish Catholics the Jew became the perfect scapegoat and the Catholic rituals of Easter served to justify the unjustifiable. There was the Good Friday prayer ‘The Act of Reparation’, the prayer for the conversion of all that did not follow ‘the true faith’, which described the Jews as ‘that pernicious race’.
Another prayer, also recited on Good Friday, rewrote the New Testament and had not the Romans but Jews piercing Christ with a spear and subsequently offering him vinegar to drink.
What really whipped up the anti-Semitism in the crowds who flocked to Kalwaria was the Passion Play, a crude, dramatised ritual in which the role of the villain was taken by Judas, and the theatre invariably focused not just on Judas but his entire race. All of this was played at Kalwaria with a large range of buildings and locations designed to transfigure the Polish town into a vision of Jerusalem at the time of Christ. Many a young peasant already in a mentally disturbed condition by the end of the drama would then queue to file past a seventeenth-century painting in the Bernardine monastery. It is designed to stoke up the sightseer’s anti-Semitism even higher. It shows Jesus Christ falling under the weight of his cross as a horde of crazed semi-human Jews tear at him. It catches the message of the Passion Play very exactly and freezes an image in the mind. After that it took nothing else for many a young man on his way back to his village to pause awhile and indulge in some ‘retribution’ on behalf of Christ.
The Wojtyla family’s attendance at the Easter performances at Kalwaria was something of a tradition. Both his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather served as guides for the pilgrims. In later life Karol Wojtyla indicated that he preferred the feast of the Assumption to the Easter Pageant. Certainly the former had powerfully influenced him. Wojtyla returned again and again to Kalwaria as a place to think and reflect yet he apparently never connected the events of Kalwaria and anti-Semitism. To him it was a sacred place. Unlike Wojtyla, Adolf Hitler did make the connection. After attending the world famous Passion Plays in Oberammergau during the 1930s he enthusiastically observed, ‘Never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed.’
In Wadowice, while Orthodox Jews generally kept themselves to themselves, the liberal Jews were more outgoing. Karol junior played in goal for the local Jewish team when their regular goalkeeper was unavailable. Karol senior, along with his son, would on occasions go to the local synagogue just as in turn Jurek Kluger, a particularly close Jewish school friend, would seek out Wojtyla in the local church where Karol was an altar boy. These attitudes and experiences were very unusual in Poland at the time. This is shown by a pastoral letter, ‘On The Principles Of Catholic Morality’, from the then head of the Polish Church, Cardinal August Hlond, on 29 February 1936.
‘There will be a Jewish problem as long as Jews remain in Poland . . . It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of Godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion . . . It is a fact that the Jews deceive, levy interest and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on Polish people is a negative one.’
Such views were very widely held among the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the interim years between the two world wars. The same year as Cardinal Hlond’s public letter a Polish Jesuit periodical asserted, ‘It is necessary to provide separate schools for Jews, so that our children will not be infected by their lower morality.’ Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan monk later canonised by Pope John Paul II for sacrificing his life in Auschwitz in order to save the life of a fellow prisoner, was during the inter-war years the editor-in-chief of a Catholic weekly, The Knight of the Immaculate. Rabidly anti-Semitic, it was very popular in Poland not least because it was seen as a Franciscan-financed paper that promoted the official position and contributed significantly to poisoning public opinion against the Jews.
Once in power Hitler banned Jews from marrying non-Jews. He then deprived them of German citizenship and banned them from public life. They were excluded from employment in public services, stripped of their pension rights and barred from working as teachers, journalists, lawyers or doctors. During the summer holidays of 1938, Wojtyla was often visited by next-door neighbour and frequent acting companion Ginka Beer. Her father, a bank manager, was taking the family to live in Palestine as Poland was no longer safe for Jews. The anti-Semitism had become bolder and louder, and there were demonstrations in the streets. Agitators were demanding a boycott of Jewish shops and, in a foretaste of Kristallnacht, their business windows were being smashed to emphasise the mob’s feelings. The courtly elder Wojtyla was very distressed. ‘Not all Poles are anti-Semites. I’m not. You know that.’
Four decades later Ginka Beer, at 64, vividly recalled saying goodbye in the Wojtylas’ apartment.
‘He was very upset. Lolek [Karol] was even more distressed. He did not say a word but his face went very red. I said farewell to him as kindly as I could but he was so moved that he could not find a single word to say in reply. So I just shook his father’s hand and left.’
Later Lolek attempted to persuade Ginka to stay but without success. Within weeks Hitler’s army would be in Czechoslovakia while his ally Generalissimo Franco, favoured by the young Karol Wojtyla, tightened his grip on Spain. Ginka’s parents never made it to Palestine. Her father was killed in the Soviet Union; her mother died in Auschwitz.
The same month that Ginka began her journey, the Wojtylas moved to Cracow to prepare for Karol’s first term at the Jagiellonian University. Father and son moved into a small basement apartment in a part of the city known as Debniki, near the Vistula River. In late 1938 and throughout the first nine months of 1939, while Wojtyla remained immersed in university life and its many attractions, war grew ever more inevitable. Not even the basic military training for the undergraduates impinged on the surreal world of the campus. The Polish philology students continued to dream, breathe and live their poetry. Through his close friend, Kydrynski, the villa of the Szkockis was opened to Wojtyla and this became the meeting place in Cracow for writers, poets, artists and musicians; there they would recite and discuss their latest works and the musicians would regale the assembled creative spirits with their latest compositions.
Wojtyla was introduced to Jadwiga Lewaj, a teacher of French and literature (an introduction that would prove very fortuitous to the young man), and while he would recite long passages of ‘Bogumil’ by Norwid, while he allowed the extreme right-wing element that controlled student housing to elect him their president, while he and his new-found friends discussed the relative merits of romanticism, lyricism and messianism, reality was edging ever closer.
At the end of 1938, even after it had become obvious that the international Baltic port of Danzig was to Hitler a prized target for acquisition, life continued as before at the Jagiellonian University. Karol Wojtyla was able to write to one of his friends, ‘For us life consisted of evenings on Dluga Street, with refined conversation until midnight and beyond.’ By the end of August 1939 posters had gone up in every village, town and city in Poland ordering all reservists and retired troops, and all men up to the age of forty years with call-up papers, to report to barracks. At the University, Wojtyla and his friends were anxiously studying not call-up papers but the syllabus for the autumn term. Earlier the same day Wojtyla had handed back the army uniform he had worn at the summer military camp. As an undergraduate he was temporarily exempted from military service.
On Friday, 1 September Cracow experienced its first air raid. German divisions were already pushing into Poland from the south and the north and the west. War had come to Poland. Confronting a Wehrmacht force of 1.25 million men that included six armoured divisions and eight motorised divisions supported by Göring’s Luftwaffe, the Polish cavalry and the other elements of the Army fought with enormous courage against overwhelming odds. By the time that Warsaw surrendered and all resistance had been crushed, over 60,000 Poles had been killed, 200,000 had been wounded and 700,000 had been taken prisoner. The Government had fled to Romania; Poland had ceased to exist.
Once again Poland found itself being carved up and annexed by its neighbours. The Soviets took 76,000 square miles of the eastern region with its population of some 12.8 million. Germany took the west, including Warsaw. A large central region that acted as a buffer zone became a Nazi ‘protectorate’ and was controlled by ‘The General Government’. Within this area were Cracow and Wojtyla and his son.
Catholic Poles quickly discovered that Hitler had plans for them as well as the Jews. Before the end of October 1939 forced labour was imposed on the entire Polish population between the ages of eighteen and sixty. The only exceptions were those occupied in ‘permanent useful social labour’, which of course was defined by the Nazis. Before the end of the year twelve forced labour camps had been created to ‘house’ male Jews. Jews, including children over twelve, would be directed to whatever work was decreed for them and disobedience was punishable by fines of unlimited amounts, prison, torture and confiscation of all assets.
Wojtyla’s fellow undergraduates were beginning to come to terms with living in an occupied country. It should have concentrated the mind of even the most self-obsessed student to witness food shortages, coal suddenly scarce in a country with a vast surplus, and long queues forming instantly on a whisper that something edible was being sold.
As early as October 1939, less than a month after the German occupation of Poland had begun, ghettos for the Jews were being created. Sometimes they were crammed into a section of a city that had historically been occupied by Jews, as in Warsaw where the Jews were forced to build a wall around the designated area and to pay for the wall.
Karol Wojtyla refused to become involved in any partisan actions. Indeed, he actively attempted to persuade others to abandon violent resistance and to trust in the power of prayer. At the end of December 1939 writing to his friend and mentor, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, the man who had first fired him with a passion for the theatre, Karol Wojtyla demonstrated that the world he lived in was somewhat detached from the general experiences in war-torn Poland.
‘First and foremost, I must tell you that I am keeping busy. Some people are currently dying of boredom, but not I, I have surrounded myself with books, dug in with Arts and Sciences. I am working. Would you believe that I am virtually running out of time! I read, I write, I study, I think, I pray, I struggle with myself. At times I feel great oppression, depression, despair, evil. At other times, as if I were seeing the dawn, the aurora, a great light.’
Wojtyla’s literary output of the period shows scant acknowledgment that hell had become a reality in Poland. He composed a great many poems during this period. He also wrote three dramatic plays and translated Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex from the original Greek into Polish in a language that ‘even women cooks can listen to with full understanding’. The three dramatic plays all had biblical themes: David, Job and Jeremiah. Writing to his mentor in Wadowice yet again, he observed of Job: ‘The play’s central message is that suffering is not always about punishment’ and that Christ’s crucifixion shows the ‘meaning of suffering’.
His letters show an extraordinary degree of self absorption on the part of the exceptionally gifted undergraduate. They harked back to the pre-war days at the Jagiellonian University. Although he had repeatedly refused to join the Armia Krajowa, the Home Army known as the AK, Karol Wojtyla had in fact become active in another clandestine movement, UNIA. This was a Catholic underground cultural resistance movement committed to keeping the country’s culture, language and traditions alive. It regarded the heritage of the motherland’s religion, poetry, drama, music and learning as sacrosanct. Just as the Nazis had publicly declared war on Polish heritage, UNIA was dedicated to its survival. Karol Wojtyla took the UNIA oath at around the time of his father’s death in February 1941.
The dramas that he and others performed secretly, his activities on behalf of the Rhapsodic Theatre, could have resulted in his arrest, if not the short train ride to Auschwitz, which after its creation in May 1940 soon became one of the principal concentration camps for members of the Polish intelligentsia. Thus, both the rehearsals and the performances always took place in the home of one of the group, never in a full-scale theatrical production. Everything was conducted in great secrecy.
At no time did Karol Wojtyla veer from his belief that prayer and a belief in a Divine Providence were preferable to an armed struggle to overcome the Third Reich. When his close friend Juliusz Kydrynski was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, Wojtyla consoled Kydrynski’s mother and prayed. Kydrynski was released after three months. Other friends and former classmates were less fortunate. Jozef Wasik was publicly executed in Cracow for his underground activities. Tadeusz Galuska was killed in action. Others just went missing, somewhere in Auschwitz.
Wojtyla had retreated into a world of secret acting and religious quietism; he also made no effort to help even a few of wartime Poland’s Jewish population. After Wojtyla’s election as Pope, the Vatican addressed this problem by pumping out disinformation that was accepted unquestioningly by the news media. The media were rapidly followed by the first wave of biographers, who recycled the original disinformation and gave it fresh life. According to the Vatican website, ‘B’nai B’rith and other authorities have testified that he (Karol Wojtyla) helped Jews find refuge from the Nazis.’ His Vatican biography says:
‘. . . He (Karol Wojtyla) lived in danger daily of losing his life. He would move about the occupied cities talking to Jewish families out of the ghettos, finding them new identities and hiding places. He saved the lives of many families threatened with execution.’
Jerzy Zubrzycki, a high school classmate of Karol Wojtyla, was quoted in Time magazine in October 1978: ‘All around him Karol saw suffering and misery. Despite the fact that his life was in constant danger, he moved about the occupied areas taking Jewish families to safety and finding them new identities.’
In The Pope In Britain, Peter Jennings wrote,
‘The most effective thing the Cardinal (at the time, Archbishop Sapieha) did was to authorise the issue of baptism certificates for some Jews who would otherwise have perished in the massacre. The young seminarian Wojtyla naturally took part in the various forms of assistance given to those who were persecuted.’
This last claim has been made by other biographers. There is compelling evidence that the late Pope did not in fact do anything at any time to save any of the Jews.
In 1985 the filmmaker Marek Halter, himself a Polish Jew, came to the Vatican to interview Pope John Paul II for a documentary about gentiles who had helped Jews during the war.
‘I didn’t ask him if it was true that he saved Jews, that he helped Jews, what he did at that time of the war really. I had testimonies. People of Stanislaw Gibisch. Other people, his Jewish friends, the son of the lawyer, Kluger, but I never asked the Pope. So when I arrived the Pope said:
“Ah you are here. You came from Paris?”
“You had a lot of Jewish friends,” I asked, “before the war?”
He said, “Yes.”
I said to him, “And all of them were killed?”
And his face changed. He said, “Yes. It’s horrible. Right. They were killed.”
And I told him, “But some of them survived. They were saved.”
He said, “Gott sei Dank!”
Then I asked him the real question. “And you, Holy Father, you did something for them?”
And then his face changed and he said, “I don’t believe I – no. No,” he said.
And I was so surprised because in my mind I believed that he was going to tell me a story. A story that during the war he was busy preparing the false papers, passports for the Jews, because I’d heard that, because people told me about that and he told me “No” so I was stopped. I didn’t know what to ask him next and my interview – that too was stopped, was finished. Except for this gesture. He took me in his arms like a brother with a very bad, guilty feeling and I was very frustrated. Very frustrated.’10
B’nai B’rith – Sons of the Covenant – is the oldest and largest Jewish service organisation within the United States. It has a wide range of activities embracing an extensive cross-section of American Jewry. Possibly the most widely known is the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights organisation. During the course of researching this book I drew their attention to the claims that had been made in their name with regard to the wartime activities of Karol Wojtyla. After extensive research, they confirmed that they had never made the claims attributed to them and that they held no evidence to justify such statements.
I contacted Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki in Australia. He claimed that the interview published by Time magazine never took place and the remarks attributed to him were never made. The Simon Wiesenthal Organisation advised me that they had no information regarding the various claims that had been made on behalf of the Pope. I contacted Yad Vashem in Israel, an organisation founded to commemorate and perpetuate the memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Dr Mordecai Paldiel, the current Head of the Righteous Department advised me, ‘We have no record of Wojtyla’s rescue of Jews during the war years . . . We have received no testimonies or documentation on this matter.’
The claims made over many years about Wojtyla’s wartime actions on behalf of Jews are a fantasy without any foundation. He had every opportunity. UNIA apart from having a cultural underground element also had a very active resistance arm with over 20,000 guerrillas. It provided false papers to more than 50,000 Jews and hid nearly 3,000 Jewish children during the war years. This secret organisation was named Zegota. Wojtyla was very well acquainted with a number of its members, men like the writer Zofia Kossak-Szczuka who was very active in Zegota. Wojtyla never took an active role in either Zegota or any other group involved in helping the Jews.
Many people would claim after the war had ended and the full horror of the Holocaust was exposed to the world that they did not know. No one living in Cracow could use such excuses. The railway line that ran through the Solvay works, the line that was considered vital to the German war effort as it carried troops, supplies and munitions to the Eastern Front also ran through the Solvay works heading west, to Auschwitz, an equally vital requirement to ensure that another part of the Third Reich’s aspirations could be fulfilled. Professor Edward Görlich is insistent that above everything that the plant’s soda products could be used for, the reason the works had their kriegswichtig designation and were vital for the war effort was the existence of the railway line. In addition, after 1941 one other factor would have denied the claim of ignorance. When the wind blew from the west the citizens of Wadowice and Cracow rapidly came to recognise the smell of burning human flesh.
In August 1987, nearly nine years after becoming Pope, Karol Wojtyla wrote to Archbishop John L May.
‘It is precisely by reason of this terrible experience that the nation of Israel, her sufferings and her Holocaust are today before the eyes of the Church, of all peoples and of all nations, as a warning, a witness and a silent cry. Before the vivid memory of the extermination, as recounted to us by the survivors and by all Jews now living, and as it is continually offered for our meditation within the narrative of the Pesah Haggadah, as Jewish families are accustomed to do today, it is not permissible for anyone to pass by with indifference. Reflection upon the Holocaust shows us to what terrible consequences the lack of faith in God and contempt for man created in his image can lead . . .’
Unlike the Good Samaritan that Wojtyla alludes to in his letter, throughout the Second World War Karol Wojtyla had indeed passed by with indifference.
In the wartime Vatican, Pope Pius XII, notwithstanding his detailed specific briefings, continued to ignore the fact that the Nazis had transformed Poland, even when those briefings detailed the numbers of priests and religious who perished in the camps. He continued to vacillate. Several of the detailed reports on the Nazi atrocities in Poland that were carried to Pius XII by trusted messengers came directly from Archbishop Sapieha in Cracow. He told the Pope that the prisoners within the camps
‘were deprived of human rights, handed over to the cruelty of men who have no feeling of humanity. We live in terror, continually in danger of losing everything if we attempt to escape, thrown into camps from which few emerge alive.’
Discussing the fate of the Jews, Sapieha told a Knights of Malta chaplain, en route to Rome and who had personally witnessed the deportation of a large number of Jews from the Cracow ghetto to Auschwitz, ‘We are living through the tragedy of these unfortunate people and none of us is in a position to help them any more. There is now no difference between Jews and Poles.’ Not everyone either in Cracow or the rest of Poland shared the Archbishop’s uncharacteristic pessimism. Jews were even saved and hidden by devout Catholics who were also anti-Semitic. They would upbraid the Jews as they shared their meagre rations with them: ‘Christ killers. Christ killers.’
When Eduardo Senatro, a journalist working on the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, suggested to Pius XII that a critical article should be written about the Nazis’ atrocities the Pope replied, ‘You must not forget, my dear friend, that there are millions of Catholics in the German army. Would you like to place them in a crisis of conscience?’ Yet in May 1940 the Pope observed to Italian diplomat Dino Alfieri, ‘Terrible things are happening in Poland. We should say words of fire against such things.’
The Pope was a firm believer in the doctrine of ‘impartiality’, a policy that he himself had helped to draft at the time of the First World War. In essence the Vatican believed that because there were Catholics fighting on both sides the Church should support neither. Pius XII never did utter ‘Words of Fire’ on the Holocaust. However, he was active in other ways against the Nazis, including an attempt to get Britain’s wartime government to back a plan conceived by senior German officers to overthrow Hitler. In hoping the plot succeeded and urging the Allies to help, the Pope moved some distance from the doctrine of ‘impartiality’.
In October 1943 Adolf Eichmann initiated a round-up of all Jews within Rome before deporting them to certain death. His recently revealed diaries establish that papal intervention saved the vast majority of them. Pius made three immediate and forceful protests. These were not public condemnations but via three different emissaries, Cardinal Maglione, Father Pancrazio Pfeiffer and Bishop Alois Hudal. These separate protests on behalf of the Pope were made directly to the German army commander in Rome, Rainer Stahel. These vital interventions were also recorded by Monsignor John Carroll-Abing who was directly involved with Father Pfeiffer’s efforts on behalf of the Jews. In January 1944 the Pope opened the gates of his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, giving asylum to some 12,000 refugees. Pius XII, according to the author Pinchas Lapide, ‘was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands’. Undoubtedly Pius XII could have done more on behalf of the Jews. But based upon all the available evidence, he could also have done less. To have saved the lives of 860,000 people is a formidable achievement.
In the summer of 1941 Himmler briefed the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss about ‘The Final Solution’. A few weeks later Soviet prisoners of war were used in trials of the poison gas Zyklon-B. They were gassed in underground cells in Auschwitz block eleven. Subsequently a gas chamber was built just outside the main camp.
The same month, June 1941, that Himmler was briefing the Auschwitz commandant, the citizens of Jedwabne, a town in eastern Poland, decided to celebrate their recent liberation from Soviet occupation by the German army, by killing every Jew in the village – 1,607 people. Some of the Jews had allegedly collaborated with the Soviet army. They were attacked with heavy wooden clubs studded with nails. Some were ordered to dig a pit and were then axed and clubbed and their bodies thrown into the pit. Some were stoned to death. Children were battered with the wooden clubs, men had their eyes gouged out and their tongues cut out. The Germans watched and took photographs as women were raped before being beheaded. The overwhelming majority were whipped and prodded into Farmer Slezynski’s barn which was doused with kerosene and set alight. The attackers played musical instruments to drown out the screams. Sixteen hundred died. The seven survivors had been hidden by Antonia Wyrzkowska who later was severely beaten by her neighbours.
During that same summer life improved for Karol Wojtyla. He was transferred from the quarry to the main plant in Borek Falecki. He continued to be allocated the extra rations and the monthly vodka coupons, which he was able to exchange on the black market for meat, eggs or other rare provisions. Wojtyla preferred the night shifts because they presented him with a great deal of time to pray and to study for his degree. He performed his various work duties quietly and efficiently. He listened a good deal more than he talked, a sensible habit for a man planning to survive the Second World War.
The war in Europe would continue until April 1945, but in Cracow it officially finished in the minds of Wojtyla and his fellow seminarians when two Soviet majors appeared at the gate to the Archbishop’s palace seeking not Nazis but a bottle of vodka. On 8 May 1945 the Allied Forces accepted the unconditional surrender of Germany. Since the invasion of Poland in 1939 more than eleven million Polish civilians had been murdered in cold blood. Among that eleven million, a minimum of six million Jews were killed. Of these, 1.1 million had been exterminated at Auschwitz. The Nazis had also gassed many thousands of gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, prisoners of war, freemasons, priests, nuns and handicapped people. Theodore Adorno memorably questioned whether after Auschwitz it was still possible to write poetry or philosophy.
‘For the world to which Auschwitz belongs is a world without soul, and the spiritual activities which remain serve to furnish it with an appearance of legitimacy which flagrantly contradicts its reality.’
It is hard to understand that just thirty miles from Auschwitz a future Pope drew continuous strength and comfort from his certain knowledge that God was constantly intervening, incessantly protecting him, an obscure young Pole, as he went about his labour, work that was deemed vital to the Third Reich’s war effort. Such a devout young man might have learnt a profound humility and compassion from the fact of surviving when so many like him were exterminated.
The killings in Poland did not stop when the war ended. The identity of the killers changed but not the category of victims. The virus of anti-Semitism within Roman Catholic Poland continued as if there had never been a world war, or places such as Auschwitz, Treblinka or Belzec. Returning Jews who had survived the Holocaust found that the Germans had indeed gone but the Jew-hating Poles had not.
In October 1943 Leon Feldhendler and Alexander Pechersky had led a planned break-out from the Sobibor death camp of more than 600 Jews. Some 200 were shot while escaping; 400 escaped, of whom 100 were recaptured and killed. The majority of the others either died of typhus or were killed by hostile Polish gangs. Only thirty survived the war including the original two leaders of the revolt. By 19 March 1946 the war in Europe had been over for ten months yet on that day Leon Feldhendler was murdered in his home town of Lublin by fellow Poles. Chaim Hirschmann, one of only two survivors of the Belzec death camp, was also murdered on that day.
Some of these postwar murders occurred because the returning Jews came back to claim homes illegally seized by Catholic Poles; the majority were murdered because they were Jews. Over 1,000 were murdered between 1945 and mid-1947. In Karol Wojtyla’s birthplace of Wadowice, the town so lovingly described by the Vatican Information Service and numerous papal biographers as being free of anti-Semitism during the inter-war years, Polish Catholics were admitting, in the privacy of the confessional, crimes ranging from theft of Jewish property to the murder of returning Jews.
Having run away in the face of the German advance in 1939, Cardinal Hlond had returned and was once again head of the Catholic Church in Poland. After a vicious pogrom in Kielce in 1946 during which forty-nine Jews were murdered, the pre-war anti-Semitic Primate gave a clear indication that nothing had changed. He knew who was to blame for the pogrom. It was the returning Jews. He declared: ‘Yet again they are holding important positions. Yet again they wish to impose a regime alien to the Polish nation.’ The Jews rapidly got the message. During the same period of time over 100,000 Jews fled the country, many heading for Palestine. This was also the same period that many in Poland laboured under the delusion that they were a free country.
In 1965 one of the key declarations of the Council of Vatican II was Nostra Aetate – In Our Time – that dealt with the relationship of the Catholic Church to non-Christian religions, including Muslims and Jews. Its passage through the Council was fraught with difficulties that continued up to the vote in favour of the declaration. The very root of Christianity’s institutionalised anti-Semitism that began at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion was re-examined, re-evaluated and finally overwhelmingly rejected. This vital and ultra-sensitive issue is the source of many dramatic but totally unfounded claims about the role of Karol Wojtyla.
The supporters of a change in the Church’s position sought to include within the declaration a statement that acknowledged that, notwithstanding the Jewish authorities pressing for the death of Christ,
‘What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures . . . . Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons, but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.’ [Author’s italics.]
Many bishops at the Vatican Council II were deeply opposed to the inclusion of these statements. They fought a bitter rearguard action.
Cardinal Augustin Bea had been charged by Pope John XXIII to prepare the draft document for debate by the Council. He later observed, ‘If I had known all the difficulties before, I do not know whether I would have had the courage to take this way.’ Cardinal Walter Kasper, recalling the controversy in November 2002, remembered,
‘There was vehement opposition from both outside and within. From inside the old well-known patterns of traditional anti-Judaism emerged, from outside there was a storm of protest especially from Muslims with serious threats against the Christians living there as a minority faith.’
There was also a threat to blow up the entire basilica along with the 2,100 bishops debating the issue. Pope Paul VI had added to an already highly charged atmosphere when in a Passion Sunday sermon on 4 April 1965 he said,
‘That people (the Jews), predestined to receive the Messiah, who had been awaiting him for thousands of years . . . not only do not recognise him, but oppose him, slander him and finally kill him.’
During the making of the television documentary ‘The Millennial Pope’ for PBS in the United States, among the many people interviewed by the producers was a former priest, James Carroll. He talked of a friend (unidentified but demonstrably a bishop) who had been at Vatican Council II. The friend had recounted the fierce debate on the issue of whether or not the Jews were guilty of Christ’s murder.
‘All of a sudden down at the end of the table, a man began to speak, a voice that he had not heard in any debate. In many debates, on many questions, he had never heard this voice.’
Carroll, recalling his conversation with his informant continued: ‘He knew it was a different voice because of the heavy accent. And the man spoke of the Church’s responsibility to change its relation to the Jews . . . I lifted up my head. I thought, who is this prophet? I looked down and it was this young bishop from Poland. And no one even knew his name. And it was the first intervention Wojtyla made at the Council. And it was very important. That’s the beginning of the large public impact he would have on this question.’
Papal biographers and others have written that Wojtyla was highly active during this debate. The following extract from the Encyclopaedia Britannica is very typical of the writings on this aspect of the Pope’s life:
‘He was invited to Vatican II, where he argued forcefully for Pope John XXIII’s redefinition of the Church’s relationship to the Jews. Wojtyla supported the assertion not only that the Jews were not guilty of killing Christ, but also that Judaism had its own ongoing integrity, that it had not been replaced by Christianity in God’s eyes.’
Claims have also been made that he was the leading author of the final declaration. In just fifteen lengthy sentences, Nostra Aetate was a groundbreaking document launching a movement to reverse 2,000 years of hatred, oppression, vilification and annihilation of Jews by Catholics in the name of God. But it owes nothing to Karol Wojtyla for its existence. Just as the stories of Wojtyla’s wartime dramatic interventions to save Jewish lives are fantasies piled on myths so the claims that have been made on behalf of Wojtyla regarding his input and influence on the creation of this historic declaration are without foundation.
The credit for this historic document should be given in particular to two men, the Jesuit Cardinal Bea and Father Malachi Martin who had doctorates in Semitic languages, archaeology and Oriental history and was destined to become a highly controversial author. Working closely with Cardinal Bea, Martin drafted the document, which exonerated the Jews from culpability in the execution of Jesus Christ. Father Martin received overwhelming if not unanimous approval from the Vatican Council and many accolades from around the world. With regard to the recollections of the anonymous friend of James Carroll and his references to the hitherto ‘silent bishop’ from Cracow, Karol Wojtyla made at least seven spoken interventions and at least four written interventions during the Council sessions. But none of them dealt with anti-Semitism, an issue on which he was mute.
That so many false claims should have been made regarding the Pope’s historic relationship and involvement with the Jewish people is highly disturbing. Equally troubling is the fact that neither Pope John Paul II nor any member of the Vatican, including his spin doctor, Dr Joaquin Navarro-Valls, ever tried to correct a false record that paints him in an undeserved heroic light.
There is one brief notable exception, which, as previously recorded, occurred when the Pope was about to be interviewed by Marek Halter.
The year of revolutions was 1968 when Europe caught fire and student-led protests erupted spontaneously but with mutual support across many countries. In Poland it began with a play, a theatrical performance of Adam Mickiewicz’s patriotic and anti-Russian play The Forefather’s Eve. It was hardly hot from the press; the author had been dead for 113 years but his writings had maintained their relevance and an energy and passion for Polish independence sprang from the page and in 1968, from the mouths of dramatic actors, they sounded like a call to arms. The playwright’s references to Russian oppressors and the Russian occupation of the homeland in the mid-nineteenth century were loudly cheered by the audience who happened to include the Soviet ambassador. The Soviet embassy would subsequently deny any involvement but the play was promptly banned. Warsaw erupted as students took to the street to protest the ban.
The protest spread through the country. Interior Minister General Moczar sent in the ORMO (Volunteer Reserve of the Citizens’ Militia). Just as in Paris, London, West Berlin and a dozen other capitals, the violence of government reaction to the protests and the brutality of militia and the police were planned and calculated. For the majority of the security forces it ‘made the job worthwhile’. When criticisms of his orders and his methods began to swell, the General picked on the scapegoat used so many times before to justify the unjustifiable. He cited a ‘massive Zionist conspiracy to overthrow the Government’ and gave out that the student organisers (or as the General preferred ‘ringleaders’) were Jews.
General Moczar’s main target was not the Jews but the Communist Party’s First Secretary, Wladyslaw Gomulka. A year earlier, Gomulka, confronted by growing criticism, had sought to deflect it by blaming a Zionist fifth column at work. Now the General, who lusted after Gomulka’s position, sought to be acclaimed as the nation’s saviour by singing the same hymn, only louder. First Secretary Gomulka had reasserted the power of the censor’s office and when serious food shortages and higher prices began to really hurt in 1967 leading to the inevitable protests, he had blamed the Jews. Now as the streets filled with protesting students whose preoccupations moved rapidly from a banned play to a concern about the events in neighbouring Czechoslovakia, Gomulka again blamed the Jews. The regime began to purge the universities and colleges of Jews, and liberals and reformers. Anyone on the streets who looked Jewish was beaten up.
The Prague Spring of democracy under new leader Alexander Dubček was flowering at an increasing pace throughout Czechoslovakia. It was of course in Moscow’s eyes another Zionist conspiracy. Taking full note of events across the border, Gomulka raised the pressure on Poland’s Jewry. The regime let it be known that any Jew who wanted to leave the country could apply to the Dutch embassy in Warsaw and begin the process to apply for entry into Israel. No other country, just Israel.
Applicants had to make a written request for permission to renounce their Polish citizenship. Supporting documents had to be acquired from employer, housing association and anyone else that officialdom could add to the list. The application took three months to be considered. During that time applicants had no idea if they were still Polish or had moved into a bureaucratic anonymity. They were deemed to be without a nationality, without a Polish address or job, without any of the basic data that reinforces a person’s identity.
If after three months the applicants had successfully cleared every hurdle that had been put in their way they were handed a piece of paper, which declared: ‘The holder of this document is not a Polish citizen.’ It was valid for two weeks. In those two weeks people had to pack their lives into a couple of suitcases and say goodbye to their homeland. Of the approximately 37,000 Jews then in Poland at least 34,000 left.
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, one of Poland’s leading intellectuals, was also a lifelong friend of Pope John Paul II. Deeply disturbed at this latest example of the darkness within the Polish psyche, he went to Cracow to raise the issue with Wojtyla.
‘I had a conversation with Cardinal Wojtyla about the anti-Semitic issue and asked him to make a stand. He agreed that it was a matter that needed to be reflected upon, that the Church should indeed make a stand.’
‘But neither he nor Cardinal Wyszynski, nor indeed any member of the Polish episcopacy, spoke out against what was being done to the Jews?’
‘That is correct.’
What contemporary observers described as a ‘bloodless pogrom’ was allowed to run its course. Both Wojtyla and Wyszynski also remained silent throughout the year on what was occurring in neighbouring Czechoslovakia. Gomulka was far less reticent and watched with increasing concern as the newly elected Dubček abolished literary and press censorship and began to rehabilitate victims of Stalinist terror trials. Next it was announced that freedom of minority opinion was guaranteed. Then travel restrictions were lifted. Then on 15 April 1968, this remarkable man and his progressive Communist regime published a 27,000-word Action Programme. That confirmed Moscow’s worst fears. Three weeks later Gomulka and a number of other Warsaw Pact leaders took part in a top-secret meeting with the Soviet Politburo. Within hours Soviet troops stationed in Poland began moving towards the Czechoslovak border south of Cracow.
Gomulka did not merely identify with Soviet policies on the Prague Spring, he pushed a hesitant Russian leadership towards a total invasion of Czechoslovakia. On 3 August 1968 in Bratislava, Gomulka and the other Warsaw Pact leaders signed a solemn ‘declaration of intent’, which was also signed by Brezhnev and Dubček. It gave the Czech leader and his colleagues everything that they had sought: freedom to continue their internal reforms, freedom to continue their process of democratisation. Eighteen days later, during the night, the tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring of democracy had become a Moscow winter of suppression. All of the Dubček reforms were abolished. Full censorship returned. All meetings that ‘endanger socialism’ were banned. In October it was announced that the Warsaw Pact troops would stay in the country ‘indefinitely’. The following April saw Dubček removed from power and replaced by Gustav Husak. He would do what Moscow told him to do. Among the troops who entered and violated a sovereign state were Polish forces. Not a voice was raised in protest by anyone within the ruling Polish Politburo or the Polish Catholic Church.
Karol Wojtyla’s first, tentative, step towards any form of political involvement occurred the year after the Prague Spring and the Polish bloodless pogrom. On 28 February 1969 during a visit to the parish of Corpus Christi he visited the Jewish Community and then the synagogue in the Kazimierz section of Cracow. This was an act of significance not merely for the small community of surviving Jews in Cracow but for Wojtyla himself. He was greeted by Maciej Jakubowicz, the leader of the community; then with his head covered he entered the synagogue and remained standing at the back throughout the service.
The visit was an isolated act and a mute one. He went because the rabbi had invited him. He made no condemnation or mention of the Government-led attack in the previous year on Polish Jewry. Many years later he was asked again by the then Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, why he had not spoken out in 1968. The Prime Minister recalled: ‘The Pope made no answer with words. He shook his head then put his face in his hands.’ It was virtually identical to the reaction witnessed by film-maker Marek Halter over the same issue of his inability to save Jewish lives during the Second World War. There would come a time when the Pope would indeed have a great deal to say on anti-Semitism but only when he no longer lived in Poland.
His complete detachment, not only during the war but for decades afterwards, from issue after issue engulfing his fellow man, stands in stark contrast to his outspoken defence of the Catholic faith. Part of Wojtyla appears to have remained a timid youth seeking monastic sanctuary well into his middle years. A multitude of fears and weaknesses can so easily hide behind the philosophy that ‘our liberation (from the Third Reich) lies at the door of Christ’, and a belief that ‘prayer is the only weapon that works’.
As a bishop and a cardinal, Wojtyla had visited Auschwitz-Birkenau many times. Like his visit to the Cracow synagogue in February 1969, these visits had been low-key, discreet and unreported. It was as if he feared to draw attention to his acts when as a man who abhorred anti-Semitism he could have set such a powerful positive example by speaking out. This inexplicable contradiction and the failure to connect were constant and recurring themes in Karol Wojtyla’s responses to anti-Semitism. Only as Pope, during his first trip back to Poland in 1979, did he make a high-profile visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau – and he went to Kalwaria first.
Now in 1986 in the Rome synagogue, the Pope quoted from the historic Vatican Council II decree Nostra Aetate, the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church’s revised position on the Jews. He reminded his Jewish listeners, needlessly, of their own past:
‘Nevertheless, a consideration of centuries-long cultural conditioning could not prevent us from recognising that the acts of discrimination, unjustified limitation of religious freedom, oppression on the level of civil freedom in regard to the Jews were from an objective point of view, gravely deplorable manifestations. Yes, once again through myself, the Church, in the words of the well-known Declaration Nostra Aetate (No 4) “deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone”. I repeat “by anyone”.’
The Pope’s use of the words ‘well-known Declaration’ was ironic. In 1970, while Cardinal of Cracow, Wojtyla wrote a book, Sources of Renewal, to serve as a guide to the Vatican Council II texts. It has enjoyed great success in many languages. In none of the editions will the reader find the ‘well-known Declaration’ that is the very essence of Nostra Aetate. Only Karol Wojtyla knows why he censored the following clear-cut condemnation of anti-Semitism:
‘. . . although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ. Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.’
Between constant references to Nostra Aetate the Pope also talked of the visit he had made to Auschwitz in June 1979 and of how he had paused in prayer at the memorial stone in Hebrew: ‘Before this inscription it is not permissible for anyone to pass by with indifference.’
However, at that precise moment at Auschwitz a group of Carmelite nuns were displaying, with the Pope’s support, not only indifference but exceptional insensitivity. In August 1984 they had taken over a building adjacent to the camp. Known as ‘the old theatre’ it had been the storehouse for the Zyklon B poison used in the Nazi gas chambers. The nuns had been granted a ninety-nine-year lease by the local authorities and within a month high-ranking members of the Polish Church had voiced approval for the creation of a convent at Auschwitz. It was later claimed that this was the Pope’s idea, originally expressed during his tenure in Cracow.
In fact Wojtyla wanted much more than a convent in Auschwitz. During a broadcast on Vatican Radio on 20 October 1971 he said,
‘The Church of Poland sees the necessity of a place of sacrifice, an altar and a sanctuary, previously in Auschwitz. This is even more necessary after the beatification of Father Maximilian. We are all convinced that in this place of his heroic immolation, a church should be erected, in the same way that since the first centuries of Christianity, churches were built on the tombs of martyrs, beatified people and saints.’
The idea of a Catholic convent at a site where over one million Jews had been murdered was deeply offensive to Jews in many countries. The Pope did nothing to end the controversy and when the nuns added a huge cross seven metres high by the camp gates with the active encouragement of Polish Primate, Cardinal Glemp, the Pope’s conciliatory words in the Rome synagogue began to take on a very hollow ring. The controversy at Auschwitz rumbled on, accompanied by a silence from Karol Wojtyla. More than 300 small crosses followed the large one. For many Jews the cross is second only to the swastika as a symbol of anti-Semitism.
It became very obvious that for many Poles who took up this issue, piety was merely a cloak for anti-Semitism. The controversy also demonstrated Roman Catholic ignorance, or perhaps indifference, towards a different faith with a different tradition. Roman Catholics venerate and make sacred any site of martyrdom, but Jewish tradition believes that such a place should be left desolate. In May 1985 a Belgian branch of an organisation calling itself ‘Aid to the Church in Need’ issued a bulletin asking for funds to help the Carmelite nuns camping in the Auschwitz convent to modernise the building. The bulletin, issued shortly before the Pope paid a visit to Belgium, described the funding as ‘a gift for the Pope’. It made no reference to the annihilation of over one million Jews at a site that was described as ‘a spiritual fortress’.
It was to become a running sore in Catholic–Jewish relations, one that could have been rapidly healed if the Pope had interceded. Unfortunately, it proved to be another example of Wojtyla’s timidity. He repeatedly refused to get involved. He made fine speeches, urging Catholics to ‘fathom the depths of the extermination of many millions of Jews during World War II and the wounds thereby inflicted on the consciousness of the Jewish people’, reminding the world that ‘freedom of religion for everyone and for all people must be respected by everyone, everywhere’. There was a flow of conciliatory documents from the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews that included ‘Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesism in the Roman Catholic Church’.
The Pope continued to offend many Jews, with the canonisation in 1982 of the Franciscan martyr, Father Maximilian Kolbe. In 1922 Kolbe had founded and edited a monthly review, Knight of The Immaculate. In 1935 Kolbe and his fellow Franciscans were running Poland’s main Catholic publishers, printing eleven periodicals and a daily newspaper The Little Daily, among whose readers was Karol Wojtyla. Within them Kolbe published over thirty anti-Semitic articles in his own name and others by different authors. Kolbe appealed to his readers to pray for
‘the straying children of Israel, to lead them to the knowledge of the truth and the achievement of true peace and happiness, since Jesus died for everyone, and therefore for every Jew also’.
He accepted without question the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of The Elders Of Zion, describing its alleged authors as ‘a cruel and crafty little known Jewish clique . . . a small handful of Jews who have let themselves be seduced by Satan’. Elsewhere he referred to ‘judaised organisations and judaised political parties which had subverted people’s faith and robbed the young of shame’ and, repeating the Roman Catholic Church’s historic accusation, he wrote, ‘Since Jewry’s most horrible crime against God, the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus . . . Jewry had fallen even lower’. Echoing Hitler’s propaganda in Germany he said that ‘Jews are interlopers in our country and can never become truly Polish without converting to Catholicism’.
Beatification in the Roman Catholic Church involves a critical examination and a minute investigation of the candidate. It must be assumed that this element of Kolbe’s past was fully examined, then ignored. The Catholic Church has always been silent on this facet of Maximilian Kolbe’s life, understandably preferring to dwell on his compassion for others and his singular courage when he begged the Auschwitz camp commandant to let him take the place of a married man with children who had been selected to die. His wish was granted and after being thrown into a starvation bunker with nine other men he prayed with them as one by one they died. After two weeks he was the last man alive and the Nazis injected phenol into his veins. He died in agony.
It is also a matter of record that in late 1939 after the Polish armies had been defeated and the country was occupied by the Germans, Kolbe and his fellow Franciscan monks gave shelter to some 3,000 Polish refugees, including 2,000 Jews. They housed, fed and clothed them. Before being arrested in February 1941 he was able to publish a final edition of The Knight of The Immaculate. He wrote, ‘No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it.’
Kolbe’s intermittent bigotry before the Second World War does not diminish, rather it enhances, his subsequent journey that ended on the floor of an Auschwitz cell. But by failing to acknowledge it at the time of his beatification, the Pope and his advisors made a propaganda gift to opponents of rapprochement between Roman Catholics and Jews.
Kurt Waldheim had served in the German army during the war. According to his own account, he was conscripted and served on the Russian front until he was wounded in December 1941. His story that he then returned to Vienna and spent the remainder of the war years studying law was not challenged until he ran for President in the Austrian elections of 1986. During a bitterly fought campaign information began to emerge that told a different story of the war years that had been concealed by Soviet and Yugoslav intelligence, and by the Vatican. The Soviet silence had been prompted by the prospect of gaining benefits during Waldheim’s two terms as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981. The Vatican’s continuing silence may have been based on old-fashioned prudence. Vatican wartime policy in the Balkans, one of the areas where Waldheim subsequently served with the Wehrmacht, included tacit approval of genocide in Croatia and the active protection both during and after the war of men who should have been tried as war criminals.
After he had recovered from his injury Waldheim resumed his career in the Wehrmacht in April 1942. Subsequently he was the liaison officer with the General Bader Combat Group while it perpetrated mass murder and deportations in the region of Eastern Bosnia. His unit was also responsible in July 1944 for the deportation to Auschwitz of the Jewish population, nearly 2,000, of Salonika in Greece. In 1944 he also approved a quantity of anti-Semitic propaganda that was dropped behind Russian lines. One pamphlet read ‘Enough of the War! Kill the Jews. Come Over!’
The Secretariat of State’s office was fully aware of his wartime activities when they arranged for Waldheim an audience with Pope John Paul II. The fact that Waldheim had served in the Wehrmacht was enough to trigger a global condemnation of the Pope. It was a replay of the protests after the Vatican’s decision in 1982 to appoint Hermann Abs, former paymaster to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, one of the ‘four wise men’ in the wake of the Ambrosiano scandal. The Reagan administration took the greatest interest in the Waldheim protests. Confidential documents from the National Security Council and the State Department reveal its deep concern.
The State Department analysed reaction in 16 different newspapers published between 22 June and 5 July 1987:
‘. . . with the exception of one paper, all were highly critical of the Pope. Thirteen papers criticised him for granting the audience; ten said that having done so, the Pope should have chastised Waldheim for his World War II activities.’
There was a similar media reaction in many countries. The fact that the Pope was scheduled to hold a meeting with American Jewish leaders during a September visit to the United States also attracted considerable press comment. An editorial in the Miami Herald was typical:
‘. . . if he still hopes for a positive September meeting, Pope John Paul II should mend his ecumenical fences with a conciliatory gesture to the freedom-loving citizens whom he offended by his blunder in an affair of State.’
Far from being contrite, the Pope dismissed the uproar as an irrelevance. The Vatican’s hardline response can be clearly gauged by comments to the then American ambassador to the Vatican, Frank Shakespeare. Cardinal Casaroli, who happened to be in New York when the storm broke, changed his schedule to have a meeting with a number of the Jewish leaders who were due to meet the Pope in September to discuss various proposals to further Jewish–Catholic relations. The Jewish leaders requested an urgent additional meeting with the Pope to express their views on Waldheim’s papal audience. In the event they had to settle for an invitation from Cardinal Willebrands of Holland in his capacity as a member of the Holy See’s Commission on Catholic–Jewish relations.
Ambassador Shakespeare discussed this meeting with Monsignor Audrys Backis, the Under Secretary of State of the Vatican’s Foreign Ministry, and Father Pierre Duprey, Vice President of the Commission. They told Shakespeare:
‘The Pope did not invite the group to Rome. They asked to come . . . There will be no question of discussing the Waldheim audience . . . There will be no discussion of the Holy See’s actions during World War II. If the Jewish delegation publishes a list of subjects to be discussed, the proposed September meeting in Miami will be cancelled . . . It is a complete lie for the New York Times to state that the Pope and four senior aides will meet with five Jewish representatives for sixty to ninety minutes.’
The Monsignor and the priest went relentlessly on. The Jews were behaving ‘in a framework of excitement’. It was made abundantly clear that the Jewish leaders could come to Rome and discuss ‘substantive questions relating to the religious dialogue between Christians and Jews’ which would be followed by a private audience with the Pope during which ‘there will be no mention of Kurt Waldheim or the Second World War’.
Apart from salvaging the scheduled Miami meeting of the Pope with Jewish leaders, the Pope and his advisors from the Secretariat of State and the Commission for Catholic–Jewish relations undertook to create, after reflection, a Vatican position document on the Shoah (the Holocaust) and its relationship to anti-Semitism. Another positive outcome from the débâcle was a valuable dialogue on the relationship between the Holy See and Israel, a subject that had preoccupied not only Jewish leaders but also the Reagan administration from 1980 onwards.
The American administration regarded Israel as a client state and took every opportunity to pressure the Vatican to enter full diplomatic relations with Israel. Cardinal Casaroli and his staff found themselves frequently explaining the Vatican position to American official visitors. The Vatican
‘was very sympathetic to Israel: our officials and theirs consult often. A variety of Israeli leaders, Meir, Eban, Shamir, Peres had been received by a variety of Popes . . . we feel as friends. There is no question that the Vatican recognises Israel and as soon as possible, we will have formal relations. For the present we must continue without them.’
Casaroli enumerated a few of the problems to his American listeners:
‘If we formalised our relations with Israel now (1987), it would prevent the Holy See from playing any role in bringing peace to the Middle East, because all of the Arab States except Egypt would break relations and stop talking to the Vatican if we exchange Ambassadors with Israel . . . There would also be a real danger to the Christian populations of Arab and other Islamic States. The status of Jerusalem is another grave issue. For a number of reasons we believe that the City should be internationalised . . . We also have a deep and continuing concern for the Palestinian people and their fate particularly their lack of a definitive homeland.’
The following year the Pope made a state visit to Austria. On the plane, a member of the travelling press corps asked him why he had received Kurt Waldheim when he stood accused of war crimes. He snapped at the reporter, ‘He was elected democratically in a democratic country.’ Virtually every other head of state in the world applied a different set of moral values and refused to invite Waldheim or accept his invitations. The United States went further and banned the former Secretary General of the United Nations from their country. The Pope continued to inflame the controversy, and demonstrate his own self-righteous stubbornness, when he arrived in Austria. He made a point of receiving Kurt Waldheim.
An extraordinary postscript to the Waldheim affair occurred seven years later. In 1994, when the full truth of Waldheim’s wartime activities was public knowledge, Pope John Paul II granted him a knighthood. Among those that the Pope discussed the honouring of Waldheim with was Cardinal Ratzinger, possibly on this occasion not the most appropriate of papal advisors. As a former member of the Hitler youth movement and the Wehrmacht, the Cardinal’s opinion might well have been open to misinterpretation. During a ceremony in Vienna on 6 July Waldheim was inducted into the Ordine Piano of Pius IX. Papal Nuncio Donato Squicciarini praised Waldheim for ‘fighting for human rights on the fateful dividing line between West and East’.
Earlier that same year, this fraught relationship had been further strained by the beatification of Edith Stein. Born into the Jewish faith in 1891 this multi-talented modern-minded woman converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 31 and entered the Carmelite order in the 1930s. She was arrested in the Netherlands along with other Jewish converts to Catholicism on 2 August 1942 and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she was executed a week later. Jewish scholars argued that the sole reason she had been executed was because she was a Jew. They saw her beatification as an attempt to ‘convert’ the Holocaust to Christianity.
It was palpable nonsense, as the Pope demonstrated in his sermon during the beatification mass in Cologne on 1 May 1987. Speaking with great eloquence and a wonderful sensitivity, he confronted the issue head on:
‘For Edith Stein, baptism as a Christian was by no means a break with her Jewish heritage. Quite on the contrary she said: “I had given up my practice of the Jewish religion as a girl of 14. My return to God made me feel Jewish again.” She was always mindful of the fact that she was related to Christ “not only in a spiritual sense, but also in blood terms”.’
He continued, ‘In the extermination camp she died as a daughter of Israel “for the glory of the most Holy Name” and, at the same time, as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, literally “blessed by the Cross”.’
With surviving members of Edith Stein’s family among the congregation he concluded,
‘Dear brothers and sisters, we bow today with the entire Church before this great woman whom from now on we may call one of the blessed in God’s glory, before this great daughter of Israel, who found the fulfilment of her faith and her vocation for the people of God in Christ the saviour . . . She saw the inexorable approach of the cross. She did not flee . . . Hers was a synthesis of a history full of deep wounds, wounds that still hurt, and for the healing of which responsible men and women have continued to work up to the present day. At the same time it was a synthesis of the full truth (about) man, in a heart that remained restless and unsatisfied “until it finally found peace in God” . . . Blessed be Edith Stein, Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, a true worshipper of God – in spirit and in truth. She is among the blessed. Amen.’
For a man who constantly proclaimed his commitment to that rapprochement, the Pope was capable of making remarkable blunders. During his 1991 visit to Poland he enraged the small surviving Jewish community, when he equated the Holocaust with the abortion issue, ‘the great cemeteries of the unborn, cemeteries of the defenceless, whose faces even their own mothers never knew’.
When from time to time the Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli was called upon to explain why the Holy See had yet to have full diplomatic relations with Israel there were two potent reasons that he never mentioned. For all the efforts of Karol Wojtyla and a great many others there was still within the Roman Curia a deeply imbedded suspicion of Israel born of an apparently indestructible anti-Semitism that refused to accept Pope John XXIII’s courageous initiative that had led to Nostra Aetate. Although such attitudes flew in the face of all John Paul II’s efforts to close the gap between the two faiths, this mattered little to the hard-core faction within the Curia who operated with stealth.
On Israel, the Roman Catholic Church had legitimate concerns which were openly expressed: Israel’s refusal to negotiate on the Vatican’s pursuit of international status for Jerusalem; the threat of restricted access to many sacred locations; the treatment of the Palestinians. Nonetheless, many within the Church were eager to claim the credit for the signing on 30 December 1993 of a ‘Fundamental Agreement’ between the Holy See and the State of Israel that led directly to the establishment of full diplomatic relations for which the Pope was particularly responsible.
The start of diplomatic relations with Israel did not mean the end of the historic controversies between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jews. Eleven years after promising to create a Vatican position document on the Holocaust or the Shoah, We Remember: A Reflection on The Shoah was finally published in 1998. The Pope and his Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews rightly saw this latest statement as a continuation of previous significant initiatives, commencing with Nostra Aetate in 1965. He had hoped that this latest document ‘will help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices’. It received mixed reactions. Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel to the United States, described it as ‘too little, too late’. At the other extreme, a fellow American Rabbi, Rabbi Jack Bemporad, saw it more positively and called it ‘a spectacular document’.
Inevitably people skimmed the fourteen-page document and used the parts which propped up their own unchanging views. In the Pope’s letter accompanying the document, he described the Shoah as ‘an indelible stain on the history of a century that is coming to a close’ and referred to its ‘unspeakable iniquity’. The document itself was even more explicit.
‘This century has witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, which can never be forgotten: the attempt by the Nazi regime to exterminate the Jewish people, with the consequent killing of millions of Jews. Women and men, old and young, children and infants for the sole reason of their Jewish origin, were persecuted and deported . . . Some were killed immediately, while others were degraded, ill treated, tortured and utterly robbed of their human dignity, and then murdered. Very few of those who entered the camps survived and those who did remained scarred for life. This was the Shoah. It is a major fact of the history of this century, a fact which still concerns us today.’
The document nonetheless caused great concern in its reading of history, when it appeared to overlook the Christian, and indeed papal, contribution to the attitudes which led to the Holocaust. It suggested that
‘by the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jews generally had achieved an equal standing with either citizens in most states and a certain number of them held influential positions in society.’
The document then identified the causes of anti-Semitism or (in its term) anti-Judaism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as
‘a false and exacerbated nationalism . . . essentially more sociological than religious . . . In the twentieth century, National Socialism in Germany used these ideas (an affirmation of an original diversity of races) as a pseudo-scientific basis for a distinction between so called Nordic-Aryan races and supposedly inferior races.’
It was a breathtaking attempt to rewrite history. It made no mention of the sordid anti-Semitism of Pius IX (1846–78), who confined Jews to the Rome ghetto and called them ‘dogs of whom there are too many present in Rome, howling and disturbing us everywhere’. On his orders a young Jewish boy, Edgardo Mirtara, was kidnapped by the Papal guard and brought up in the ‘true faith’ as the Pope’s adopted ‘son’. It also airbrushed his successor Leo XIII (1878–1903) and his reign that depicted Jews simultaneously as ‘rich greedy capitalists’ and ‘dangerous socialists’. With Leo’s approval in 1880 La Civilta Cattolica described the Jews as ‘obstinate, dirty, thieves, liars, ignoramuses, pests . . . a barbarian invasion by an enemy race’. It also failed to mention the blood libel, which persisted among Roman Catholics well into the twentieth century, that Jews murdered Christians and drained their blood for Passover rites. It said nothing of the Catholic clergy in Poland who proclaimed anti-Semitism as frequently as they quoted the New Testament, including men like Jozef Kruszynski who wrote in 1920, the year of Karol Wojtyla’s birth, ‘If the world is to be rid of the Jewish scourge, it will be necessary to exterminate them, down to the last one.’
Several times within this reflection on the Shoah, however, regret and sorrow was expressed: ‘for the failures of her (the Catholic Church’s) sons and daughters in every age’. But nowhere did the Church acknowledge institutional failure. The document was especially provocative in extolling the virtues of the highly equivocal wartime Pope Pius XII, without honestly confronting his failings.
The Jubilee Year 2000 also saw an event with more lasting significance, a public apology by the Pope for the past errors of the Church. It was a stunning break from a tradition of never admitting wrong, which alarmed Roman Catholics in many countries. The Vatican panel of theologians admitted that ‘there was no Biblical basis for Papal repentance’ and that ‘in no previous Holy Year since 1300’ had there been ‘any awareness of the faults in the Church’s past or in the need to ask God’s pardon’. The apology was expressed in a document Memory And Reconciliation: The Church and The Faults of The Past, based on three years’ work by more than thirty scholars. In its fifty-one pages it did not attempt to enumerate all the wrongs perpetrated by the Church over the past 2,000 years.
The ‘Church’ was defined not merely as
‘the historical institution alone or solely the spiritual communion of those whose hearts are illuminated by faith. The Church is understood as the community of the baptised, inseparably visible and operating in history under the direction of her pastors, united as a profound mystery by the action of the life-giving spirit.’
After a long, highly-detailed, historical and theological examination of the concept of forgiveness and various key elements of the Church and its place in history, the scholars turned to specific areas where events indicated the need to ask for forgiveness. These included the Catholic Church’s role in the historic divisions that had occurred within Christianity and the use of force in the service of Truth. It went on to ask whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews
‘was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices embedded in some Christian minds and hearts . . . Did Christians give every possible assistance to those being persecuted and in particular to the persecuted Jews?’
The remarkable document showed a rare virtue under Wojtyla’s papacy – humility. It led to an act by John Paul II that was also without precedent, when he declared 12 March 2000 a ‘Day of Pardon’. He celebrated the Eucharist with a number of cardinals in the Vatican Basilica, and in his sermon stated that ‘the Church can sing both the Magnificat for what God has accomplished within her and the Miserere for the sins of the Christians, for which she stands in need of purification, penance and renewal’.
‘Given the number of sins committed in the course of twenty centuries,’ said the Pope, any recital and request for pardon ‘must necessarily be rather a summary.’ He made it clear that this confession of sins was not addressed to anyone other than God ‘who alone can forgive sins, but it is also made before men, from whom the responsibilities of Christians cannot be hidden’. During the service, the sins and errors quoted above from the Memory and Reconciliation document were proclaimed by members of the Curia. Many others were also confessed, including Sins Committed in Actions Against Love, Peace, The Rights of Peoples, and Respect for Cultures and Religions; Sins against the Dignity of Women and the Unity of the Human Race; and Sins in Relation to the Fundamental Rights of the Person.
Within hours of this act of self-abasement before a global audience of hundreds of millions, the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Israel Meir Lau, welcomed the papal plea for forgiveness but declared himself ‘a little bit disappointed’ that the Pope had made no mention of the Nazi Holocaust or the wartime role of Pius XII. A member of the Secretariat of State was still incandescent when I discussed the Chief Rabbi’s response with him more than a year after the event.
‘No matter what the Holy Father said it was never going to be enough. Sometimes they remind me of traders in the market place. The haggling. The hand-wringing. We’ve conceded so much to this small group of people.’
‘Small group?’ I questioned.
‘Do you know how many Jews there are in this world?’
‘Not the precise figure . . . fifteen million?’
The member of the Curia moved his hands to a palm upwards position and raised his shoulders slightly as he nodded and smiled.
Less than two weeks later the Pope again expressed his grief at the Holocaust and ‘the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place’. This time he was speaking at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. During this long-desired journey he visited Bethlehem and other historic locations. He also spent time in the Palestinian refugee camp of Dheisheh telling the thousands of refugees
‘not to lose heart . . . the Church will continue to be at your side and will continue to plead your cause to the world . . . I call on the political leaders to implement agreements already in place.’
Historic controversies between Catholics and Jews are still very much alive in the twenty-first century. For example, a year-long study by a commission of three Catholics and three Jewish scholars of the Vatican’s wartime policies and the role of Pius XII concluded that there were many hundreds of documents that had yet to be made available from Vatican archives. Critics of these investigations have argued that enough is enough and that the apologies given by the Pope should suffice. There is a growing belief that to apologise for the inaction of a generation long dead is meaningless and that further ‘the drive to affix blame often ignores the actions by many Catholics – lay, priests and bishops – that saved thousands of Jews from genocide.’ Critics have also suggested that the demands by the World Jewish Congress for further apologies have actually fed the growing anti-Semitism it fears.
Nostra Aetate demonstrated a Roman Catholic Church determined to unshackle itself from a specific historical position, one that it had held for nearly 2,000 years. Pope John Paul II had also travelled far from the Second World War and the subsequent three decades when he was one of the silent ones who did indeed ‘pass by with indifference’ but the myths of his ‘involvement’ to save and protect Jews in Poland still abound. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his papacy, the Anti-Defamation League congratulated Pope John Paul II and proclaimed ‘he has defended the Jewish people at all times, as a priest in his native Poland . . .’ Not so: there was no Wojtyla defence of the Jews at that time. He asked God many times for forgiveness. His penance was to push forward, through numerous obstacles, towards the present time when the Roman Catholic Church has acquired a greater understanding and appreciation of Judaism. There is still much to be done, on both sides.
December 2003 was the tenth anniversary of the signing of the ‘Fundamental Accord’ that led to the establishment of full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Holy See in June 1994. The ensuing years have presented those within the Vatican who fought against the Accord with considerable ammunition and those who battled on behalf of the agreement with precious little to show for their efforts.
Israel has failed to enact the legislation that the agreement called for; failed to honour the agreements on Church properties within the Holy Land; consistently broken off talks without offering any explanation; failed to renew visas for Catholic missionaries working in the Holy Land; failed to agree terms on the promised economic accord; consistently failed to address Vatican concerns regarding Israel’s so-called ‘security wall’ which has dispossessed Catholic communities from their lands and restricted access to churches and shrines in total violation of the Fundamental Accord; and in further violation of the Accord threatened to seize funds from Church-related institutions such as the Saint Louis Hospital which cares for the terminally ill. Despite every effort from Vatican diplomats and sharp prodding from the Bush administration, promises to address these issues have been followed by a refusal to resolve them. The Pope’s initiatives, bravely taken in the face of considerable hostility, have over the past nineteen years been continuously trampled upon by successive Israeli governments. As of January 2007, Israel had still failed to implement any of the above.
Anti-Semitism is on the rise again throughout Europe, in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the Pope’s motherland. In Poland, a nationalistic radio station, Radio Maryja (Mary) controlled by Catholic priests, pumps out the old poison of ‘Jewish conspiracies’ and condemns ‘American Jews’ while the Polish Catholic hierarchy remains silent. Although the European Jewish Congress strenuously denies any linkage, the continuing Israel–Palestinian conflict is undoubtedly a primary cause of rising anti-Semitism.
At the end of March 2004 a movie loomed large over the relationship between the Holy See and worldwide Jewry: The Passion of the Christ, made by Mel Gibson, a man committed to a singular branch of Catholicism and a set of secular myths.
Gibson defended himself from charges that his film was anti-Semitic and said that he was ‘well aware of the evil of anti-Semitism and I oppose it’. He added that ‘as an Irish-Catholic-Australian I know more than a bit about religious and social prejudice and relate to Jews as fellow sufferers.’
That the film does not confine itself to the Gospel sources, that there are totally fictional scenes and elements in the Gibson version of Christ’s last twelve hours is self-evident. That is of course any filmmaker’s right but it undermines the claim of authenticity. The source for the additional material is Anne Catherine Emmerich, an Augustinian nun born in Germany in 1774. An alleged stigmatic and ecstatic, her ‘visions’ were written down by Clemens Brentano and subsequently published. They include grotesque anti-Semitic characterisations of Jews, an aspect that Gibson has clearly seized upon and used within his film. Mel Gibson’s father believes that Vatican Council II was ‘a Masonic plot backed by the Jews’ and is also on record as denying the full size and magnitude of the Holocaust. His son does not embrace such views but shares with his father the belief that the papal throne has remained vacant since the death of Pius XII and that the election of John XXIII was fraudulent, which would also void all subsequent elections. It is curious that the film-maker should have sought papal approval of his film from a man that he considers to be a ‘false Pope’.
Both Opus Dei and the Legionnaires of Christ have played key roles as active supporters of Mel Gibson and his movie. Members of the Legionnaires arranged a number of private screenings to very carefully selected invited audiences of influential people. Opus Dei arranged two particular private screenings for the Pope in his private apartments within the Vatican. The Pope usually refrained from expressing public opinions on artistic works. Privately he is alleged to have said, ‘It is as it was.’ The only other person in the room was his personal secretary and friend for forty years, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz. To the general embarrassment of the Vatican the alleged remark was given global publicity as a papal endorsement of a film, already being attacked by many as being rabidly anti-Semitic. Dziwisz denied that the Pope had ever expressed an opinion, which came as a surprise to one of its producers, Steve McEveety, who had heard it directly from Dziwisz.
The papal spokesman and Opus Dei member Navarro-Valls privately e-mailed McEveety on the alleged comment: ‘Nobody can deny it. So keep mentioning it as the authorised point of reference. I would try to make the words, “It is as it was” the leitmotif in any discussion on the film.’ The e-mail concluded: ‘Repeat the words again and again and again.’
The private screenings, courtesy of the Legionnaires of Christ, were also paying rich dividends with a series of powerful endorsements from Curial heavyweights and theologians. Opinion was manipulated long before public release of the movie. These events powerfully underline the current level of control exercised within the Vatican by Opus Dei, the Legionnaires of Christ and other extreme reactionary forces. With that kind of endorsement, global success was guaranteed and it duly followed. The film has been both acclaimed and denounced. Some have described it as powerfully conveying the core of Christianity; others regard it as virulently anti-Semitic. By the end of 2004 Gibson was £200 million richer and the Pope had beatified Emmerich.
Its long-term influence remains to be seen, but one must wonder whether the late Pope’s succinct reaction came not from his knowledge of the Gospels but from his experiences as a child and young man watching the Passion Plays at Kalwaria.
In July 2006 after being arrested in Malibu, California, on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol, Gibson launched into a tirade that included anti-Semitic statements, ‘Fucking Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world . . .’ The following day a contrite Gibson issued a statement that talked of his shame and admitted that he has ‘battled with the disease of alcoholism for all of my adult life and profoundly regret my horrific relapse’.