CHAPTER 8: Escaping death five times

When people talk about the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, they talk about the day in St. Peter’s Square, a large concrete area, at Vatican City, in Rome, Italy, on May 13, 1981, when a man with a gun fired two shots and hit the Pope in the chest and on one finger.

He almost died.

But most people don’t know about four other near-misses in which Karol Wojtyla almost died.

Escaping death the first time:

When Karol was a nine-year-old boy he and friends chased each other one morning and ran into one of the boy’s father’s bar and café just down the street from the apartment where Karol lived with his father. That day the café was closed. The owner’s son ran in and found a revolver under the counter that had been left by a customer, a military officer. He picked it up and believing the gun was not loaded, pointed it straight into Karol’s face and pulled the trigger. A window broke and the shot stunned them. The boy with the gun trembled. They all stood paralyzed with fear. Karol’s friend with the gun was certain he had pointed it directly at Karol’s face but he missed. One boy began to cry

Escaping death the second time:

One night, during the Second World War, Karol was walking the eight-kilometre journey home after working late. A German military truck motored down a street of Krakow and knocked Karol down. The truck didn’t stop. Karol landed in a ditch where he was found unconscious several hours later. He was in a coma. With help, the woman who found him, was able to get him to a hospital. He suffered from a fractured skull and was in a hospital for three weeks.

Escaping death the third time:

In 1944, the people of Warsaw, Poland’s captial city, rebelled against the German army. The Nazis responded by rounding up every man they found in Krakow and sending them to a concentration camp. That night Karol hid in the basement of the house where he and his father lived. When no one answered the door that night, German soldiers broke in and searched only the first and second floors. Karol was in the basement, on his knees, praying. The next day he did not appear at his factory job, where the Nazis had ordered him to work and provide the Nazi army with supplies. The Nazi officers interrogated his friends and started a citywide hunt for Wojtyla. But it was too late. Karol Wojtyla was never seen by them again. To avoid arrest, Karol was hidden in the basement of the local archbishop’s palace. He was already working in an underground movement to fight the Nazis who eventually put his name on the Nazi blacklist. He became a wanted man and as resistance efforts increased, he was in grave danger of being executed for helping Jews hide. As part of the underground movement he helped to supply Jews with forged documents to avoid deportation to concentration camps and also distributed an underground newspaper. He ran forged documents to and from different houses in the city of Krakow during the night. For the last five months of the war, until January, 1945, he was hunted and lived in fear of his life.

He later wrote: " I could have been arrested any day, at home, in the stone quarry, in the plant, and taken away to a concentration camp. Sometimes I would ask myself: so many young people of my own age are losing their lives, why not me? Today I know that it was not mere chance."

One of his friends didn’t make it to the end of the war. Seminarian Jerzy Zachuta didn’t show up at church one morning for Mass. Afterwards, Karol went to his house to find him and was told the Gestapo had been there in the middle of the night and taken him away. A sign was soon posted listing the seminarian among names of those who were to be shot.

Escaping death the fourth time:

The assassination attempt.( See chapter 17.)

Escaping death the fifth time:

In 1982, a man tried to attack the Pope with a knife in Portugal. The man was caught before he could reach the Pope.

CHAPTER 9: He just looked at me

Ginka Beer was a Jewish girl who left Poland for Palestine (now Israel) in 1937.

"There was only one family who never showed any racial hostility toward us, and that was Lolek and his dad," she recalled. She remembers saying good-bye to Karol and his father and both were very upset. "But Lolek was even more upset than his father. 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 in reply. So I just shook the father’s hand and left."

Fifty years later she visited the Vatican with others from their hometown of Wadowice, Poland. While in St. Peter’s Square during a Wednesday General Audience, in which the pope greets thousands of people, a friend pushed his way towards the Pope and said: "Ginka is here."

"Where?" the pope replied and he immediately called to her.

She asked if he remembered her. "Of course, I do," he replied. "You are Ginka. We lived in the same building. How is your sister Helen?"

She told him that her mother had died at the Auschwitz concentration camp and that her father died in the Soviet Union.

"He just looked at me and there was a deep compassion in his eyes," she said. "He took both my hands and for almost two minutes he blessed me and prayed before me, just holding my hands in his hands. There were thousands of people in the square, but for a few moments, there were just the two of us."