ROBERT S. WISTRICH
105
Polish army captain (in the reserves). I also knew that, like my parents,
he had been in Lvov in
1940
(then under Soviet occupation) after hav–
ing escaped from the Germans. Again, like them, he and his son Jerzy
had been relocated to the interior of the Soviet Union. The Klugers' itin–
erary was remarkably parallel to that of my own family. They had
arrived in a work camp somewhere within the Soviet Socialist Republic
of Maryjskaya (about four hundred miles east of Moscow) in the mid–
dle of a dense forest. Like many other Poles, having been classified as a
kind of "slave labor," they had to cut timber with handsaws and drag it
to the railroad or the nearby Volga river for transport downstream.
Jerzy (better known as Jurek) always managed to "fulfill his norm" and
showed the kind of enterprise in adapting to the hardships of Russia
that reminds me of the stories of my American cousins who lived
through similar experiences in their early twenties. Like them, he was
physically strong, had an eye for women, and was constantly getting in
and out of trouble.
One difference between the Klugers and the Wistrichs (at any rate
those of my father 's family who found themselves in Russia) was that
both Wilhelm and Jerzy were determined to serve in the Polish armed
forces. They managed, after various adventures, to join General
Anders's Polish Army which finally succeeded in evacuating about
150,000
Polish troops from the wartime Soviet Union. Jurek and his
father eventually arrived in Palestine, were transferred like their fellow
Poles to the British Army, and (in Jurek's case) fought valiantly in North
Africa and Italy for the Allied cause.
O'Brien narrates these adventures with gusto and skill, while simul–
taneously following Karol Woytyla's painful experiences in German–
occupied Poland between
I939
and
1944.
Lolek lost his father (his
mother had died when he was a young boy), then worked for a time as
a quarry laborer before beginning clandestine studies for the priesthood
in
1942
under the wing of Krakow's princely Archbishop, Adam
Sapieha. He was ordained in Krakow on the Feast of All Saints in
1946
before being sent to Rome to write his doctoral dissertation at the
Dominican Angelicum University-a thesis about
The Issue of Faith in
Saint John of the Cross,
which he completed two years later.
In
the
1950S
Woytyla went on to teach ethics at the Catholic University of
Lublin (the only such institution in the Communist bloc) while stillliv–
ing in Krakow. He continued to write scholarly and religious articles, as
well as poems, plays, and theatrical reviews under a
nom de plume.
In
1958
he was appointed bishop (by the dying Pope Pius XII) and
four years later was already one of the youngest bishops to attend the
