In early 1945, a thirteen-year old Jewish girl came out of a Nazi labour camp in Czestochowa, Poland. With no food in her stomach and hardly any flesh on her bones, she sat down exhausted in the corner of a train station, still clothed in the striped uniform of a prisoner. It was the middle of the Polish winter. The weather was freezing, the wind biting cold. These were the final months of a long and senseless war, and people were weary from their own suffering. No one noticed the little emaciated girl huddled in the corner.
No one, except for a young seminarian. He approached her, struck up a conversation and helped her. His name was Karol Wojtyla. Thanks to his kindness she survived. Edith Zirer later recalled: ‘I remember perfectly well. I was there, I was a 13-year-old girl, alone, sick, and weak. I had spent three years in a German concentration camp at the point of death. And, like an angel, Karol Wojtyla saved my life; like a dream from heaven: he gave me something to drink and eat and then carried me on his back some four kilometres in the snow, before catching the train to safety.’
For many years, Edith kept this story to herself. Then in 1978, when Karol Woytyla was elected Pope, she knew she felt she simply had to share this story. On 23 March 2000, 45 years after being rescued by this young seminarian, she had the opportunity to thank him when they met in the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem.
Pope John Paul II’s visit to the Holy Land was the high point of the Jubilee Year 2000 and also one of the high points of his whole Papacy. On the same day that Pope John Paul II met Edith Zierer, he also listened to an address by the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who remarked that John Paul II had felt the sufferings of the Jewish people as though they were his own sufferings. Barak also praised him for continuing the great path opened up by Pope John XXIII: ‘You, Your Holiness, were a young witness to the tragedy. And as you wrote to your Jewish childhood friend, you felt, in some sense, as if you yourself experienced the fate of Polish Jewry. When my grandparents, Elka and Shmuel Godin, mounted the death trains at Umschlagplatz near their home in Warsaw, headed towards their fate at Treblinka – the fate of three million Jews from your homeland – you were there, and you remembered. You have done more than anyone else to bring about the historic change in the attitude of the Church towards the Jewish people, initiated by the good Pope John XXIII, and to dress the gaping wounds that festered over many bitter centuries.’
What was it that Pope John Paul II did to advance the cause of Catholic-Jewish relations? Many deeds, words and gestures stand out in the course of his long pontificate. There is not enough space here to look at them all, so let me highlight just a few key moments.
They say that the child is the father of the man, and John Paul II’s affection for the Jewish people began in his home town of Wadowice, where as a child he had many Jewish friends and neighbours. Later he acutely felt their suffering during the Holocaust. It was only natural that the Jewish people would have a special place in his heart when he became Pope.
On 13 April 1986 John Paul II did something that no Pope since Saint Peter had ever done: he visited a synagogue. The Italian newspaper Il Giornale captured the importance of this visit in these words: ‘No trip of this pilgrim Pope to any continent was so long as the one he made today; the short distance between the Vatican palace and the synagogue of Rome took two thousand years to cover.’
The visit to the synagogue of Rome gave the ultimate seal of approval to the new and warmer relationship between Christians and Jews. While there, John Paul II uttered these remarkable words: ‘the Jewish religion is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but is in a certain way ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion’. What the Pope seems to have meant is that we can only truly understand who we ourselves are as Catholics through coming to understand Judaism. Our own identity is somehow dependent upon the Jewish faith. When we begin to search the richness and depth of our own religion, we discover that we have a unique relationship with Judaism, of an altogether different quality to our relationship with any other non-Christian religions.
John Paul II (assisted especially by the then Cardinal Ratzinger) promoted the Vatican’s recognition of the State of Israel (ambassadors were exchanged in 1994). This recognition was of huge significance not only for the Jewish population in Israel, but also for the worldwide Jewish community. Many Christians have little or no idea how important the land and state of Israel is for Jewish identity. The land of Israel is deeply rooted in the Jewish mind and heart, and has been for 4,000 years, since God’s promise to Abraham to guide him into a special land. For Jewish people, to renege on the land of Israel is tantamount to reneging on Scripture and on what God himself has promised. Israel’s existence is of enormous comfort to the Jews: it is a concrete sign that, despite the horrors of the Holocaust, God has not abandoned them, that His covenant endures. This realisation gives them confidence in their Jewish identity and hope for the future.
One of the most moving gestures of Pope John Paul II’s entire pontificate was his insertion of a written prayer into a crack of the Western Wall of the Temple, during his visit to Jerusalem in March 2000. The Western Wall has a special sacredness for the Jewish psyche: it has been a place of veneration, prayer, and pilgrimage for centuries. There was something profoundly touching about Pope John Paul II, carrying the weight of the years, making his way slowly and haltingly toward this Wall, bowing his head in silence and praying, before inserting his written prayer into a crevice of the Wall.
The prayer expressed deep sadness and repentance, but also genuine hope for a better future. It is a fitting prayer with which to end this article:
God of our fathers,
you chose Abraham and his descendants
to bring Your name to the nations:
we are deeply saddened
by the behaviour of those
who in the course of history
have caused these children of Yours to suffer
and asking Your forgiveness
we wish to commit ourselves
to genuine brotherhood
with the people of the Covenant.
Jerusalem, 26 March 2000.
Joannnes Paulus II