Keys of This Blood (93 page)

By then, war was already on the horizon again. Pope Pius XII urged Cardinal Primate Hlond to leave Poland; and, in anticipation of that move, Archbishop Sapieha was given wider ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In effect, during Hlond's World War II absence from Poland, Sapieha would function as Primate; and, in practical if not strictly legal terms, he would assume the function of
Interrex
as well.

On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler poured seventy armored divisions—a total of nearly a million men—across the Polish border in a blitzkrieg assault by land, sea and air. Once again, Poland became the prime Killing Field of Europe. And Poles themselves became the object of planned genocide.

On January 25, 1940, on the instruction of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring, the provisions of the so-called
Secret Circular
went into effect in Poland. In the words of the German Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank—the “Pig of Poland,” as he was justly dubbed—the
Secret Circular
was the handbook for the German policy of “making certain that not one Polish man, woman or child was left alive to soil the territories now and forever a part of the Third Reich.” Under Frank, those policies reached an advanced degree of thorough ruthlessness and unmerciful cruelty.

Poles were divided into two classes. Those engaged in industries essential to the German war effort were to be kept alive on the barest possible rations. The rest—women, children, clergy, scientists, teachers, doctors, architects, merchants, unessential craftsmen—all were to be got rid of by execution, starvation and deportation.

The records are almost incredible. Six million Polish citizens were killed by the Germans, including 644,000 killed in combat and a million more deported to die in Siberia. The Nazis developed their efficiently brutal network of 8,500 concentration camps in Poland and organized them, as the industry they were, into thirteen administrative districts. Of the 18 million Europeans imprisoned in these camps, 11 million were killed—3.5 million Poles and 7.5 million from other nations.

The Roman Catholic Church and its hierarchy became a concentrated
target for General Frank. All bishops were at least harassed. Some were only placed under house arrest. Others, however, were tortured; and many were deported or killed. One of the most notable cases was Father Anton Baraniak, who had been secretary to Cardinal Primate Hlond before Hlond had left Poland for France and Italy. During his imprisonment, Baraniak was made Bishop and so became the only Polish bishop imprisoned by the Nazis.

It was obviously Baraniak's close association with Cardinal Primate Hlond that interested Hans Frank. There were sensitive Vatican secrets to be had; and beyond that, if Baraniak as a cleric closely associated with the redoubtable August Hlond could be forced into a public endorsement of the Nazi presence, Frank's life would be easier in Poland. Despite the torture to which he was subjected, however, Baraniak became a disappointment for the “Pig of Poland,” and a symbol of resistance for the Poles.

By 1942, well over 7,500 Polish priests had been deported to the especially infamous concentration camps of Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Radogoszcz and Opausa. All diocesan offices were closed. All Polish seminaries and all secondary and higher educational establishments were shut down. All Polish libraries that were not destroyed were transported to Germany, and no new books or periodicals could be published. The historic primatial palace in Gniezno was destroyed, and the Gniezno Cathedral became a German concert hall.

As Governor General, the “Pig of Poland” decided to make his residence and headquarters in Archbishop Adam Sapieha's Krakow and to make that city a special example of his thorough Nazi brutishness.

Frank took Wawel Castle, a gorgeous and priceless antiquity, for his private residence. The Mining Academy of Krakow became his official headquarters. The “Institute for German Labor in the Fast”—the hateful euphemism for those who masterminded and directed this concerted genocide of Poles—was housed in the buildings of the Jagiellonian Library, whose collections and contents were shipped to Germany. The venerable Jagiellonian University was closed, and its professors were deported to two of the most feared concentration camps, Fort VII and Lawica, where all prisoners were degraded, vilified and tortured, and where many of them joined the toll of the dead.

Krakow's street names were all changed to German ones. The German officer corps took up residence in the comfortable houses on what had been the proud avenues of Krasinski, Mickiewicz and Slowacki. But worst of all was the prison on Montelupi Street, where night and day anyone passing by could hear the noises of the charnel house that place
became—the screams of the tortured, the moaning cries of the starved and the dying, the maniacal laughter of prisoners driven insane and, not infrequently, the staccato sounds of firing squads.

From the outset, the German occupation, in general, and the presence in Krakow of the “Pig of Poland,” in particular, were to Adam Sapieha as red flags are to a bull. In the frigid interviews that took place between the two men, it is doubtful if Hans Frank's brutishness and Nazi arrogance were a match for Archbishop Sapieha's haughty, calm and superior dignity, which had always served Cardinal Dalbor so well.

In his daily life as functioning
Interrex
of Poland, however, Sapieha was anything but calm. Rather, he was the living, breathing example of Cardinal Hlond's dictum that the Church cannot deal with its lethal enemies by “running into the shadows,” nor can it be “occupied solely by staving off attacks.” The call instead was one of “carrying off and establishing the victory that overcomes the world.”

In one sermon at his residence, Sapieha spoke of the need to purify
Polonia Sacra
of “the filth of these swine”—but “intelligently done,” he said, “for we are Poles.”

In his cold, hard way, the Archbishop meant every word; and he found many and varied ways of doing exactly what he said. As early as 1939, seeing the handwriting on the wall, he had already established underground seminaries and universities. Now, in an unremitting labor of fine judgments and practical decisions upon which depended his own life and the lives of thousands of others, Sapieha entered into what was nothing less than a Polish national conspiracy against the Nazis. He kept the Vatican informed about the actual state of affairs in Poland; and, through the Vatican and the Polish government in its London exile, he collaborated with the Polish partisans. He issued false baptismal certificates to Jews, and organized networks to feed and conceal those who could not be got out to freedom.

Undoubtedly, Adam Sapieha was the most prominent, influential and capable Churchman left free in Poland. And, for the Polish Roman Catholic mind, his active presence as functioning
Interrex
during those bloody and waning years of the Second Polish Republic was yet another clear indication of God's providence over
Polonia Sacra
.

Two years into this planned desolation of his homeland, young Karol Wojtyla made his decision to enter clerical life. He applied to Archbishop Sapieha for permission to study for the priesthood. He had already spent a year studying linguistics at the Jagiellonian University; and when the
university had been shut down by the Germans, he had spent another year as a boiler-room helper at the Solvay Chemical Works.

After Sapieha accepted him into the underground seminary, there was no outward sign to the Germans that Wojtyla's life had changed. That would have been fatal, in all likelihood. He continued to live at home with his father, and he put in his hours at the chemical plant. But in his off hours, along with the other underground seminarians, he followed philosophy and theology courses at the Archbishop's residence. And he came under the close personal direction of Adam Sapieha, the first of two extraordinary archbishops who would be most responsible for his own formation as the Churchman he was to become.

In his two years under Sapieha's direction, Wojtyla was the recipient of many of the older man's reflections and of much of his experience. At the Archbishop's hand, he received his first schooling in how a true Churchman deals with a mortal enemy of the Church's faith. As another of Sapieha's underground seminarians later recalled, when the Archbishop of Krakow set forth from his official residence in his carriage, he created an immediate atmosphere of respect. “Not a mere man but a whole, grand institution—the Church—was passing by you.”

Suddenly, on September 7, 1944—Black Sunday—German squads fanned out through Krakow. They were preparing to leave in the face of the Soviet armies advancing under Marshal Ivan Koniev. All adult Poles were to be rounded up and deported to Germany. Karol Wojtyla's name was on their list.

Whether in their haste the squads failed to comb the Debnicki section of town, where he lived, or whether Wojtyla eluded them is not clear. At any event, they did not take him. A later message from Sapieha told him and other underground seminarians to make their way to the Archbishop's residence and hide there.

By January of 1945, the Germans were gone. But the Allied agreements of 1945 and 1946 at Yalta, Teheran and Potsdam “assigned” Poland and its people to the Soviet zone of influence, and to their second dark night of entombment as a nation. Now the Stalinists were in charge.

There can have been no doubt in Sapieha's mind what was to come; he was too much of a realist to play mind games with himself or anyone else. With that same foresight and acumen that marked so much of what he accomplished as a Churchman, he singled out Karol Wojtyla from among his seminarians and arranged for him to leave Poland in 1946 to pursue doctoral studies in Rome.

Already ordained a priest by then, for the next two years Father Karol Wojtyla lived in Rome at the Belgian College, which was not run by the
Resurrectionist Fathers, but was still imbued with the same spirit of Polish
romanitas
that had furnished the Church in Poland with its indomitable clergy for nearly a century now.

Wojtyla pursued his studies, meanwhile, at the Angelicum—in that day still hands down the best school anywhere in the Church, and still run by such Dominicans as Garrigou-Lagrange, who were hands down among the best minds anywhere.

By the time Wojtyla returned to Poland in 1948 to take up his own post as parish priest, Poland was a one-party Communist state under Stalin's quisling Boleslaw Bierut. Adam Sapieha, now a cardinal, had three years to live. August Hlond had died, and Poland's Primate and
Interrex
was the “Fox of Europe,” Stefan Wyszynski.

There can be no doubt that the brutalization of the Polish nation by the Germans, followed by the Allied betrayal of the Second Polish Republic and the ruthless Stalinization of all things that ensued, dispelled any aery-faery romanticism that may have lingered in the Poles.

Like many of his generation born between the world wars, Karol Wojtyla had been influenced by the Messianist poets of the nineteenth century. Mickiewicz, for one, had acquired world status; and images he and the others had used, their genuine lyricism, the language they fashioned, the concepts they evolved, had easily entered the people's consciousness as part of their Polish heritage during their emergence into the brief daylight of the Second Polish Republic after more than 120 years of enslavement.

Now, however, the great world had once more offered Poland as a non-nation into the total control of a merciless power. And once more, it was a power that aimed precisely at eviscerating and cremating classical Polishness.

In this second night that fell over
Polonia Sacra
, Poles of Wojtyla's generation saw a clear signal from God that neither the messianic role imagined for their country by its past and dead dreamers, nor its republican status attempted between the two world wars, was to be Poland's destiny. All that was null and void. It did not fit with God's overall plan for Europe. Nor did it fit with God's particular providence for this people. Their true greatness, it seemed, tied always to the Three Pacts of Polishness, was to be linked to the larger Europe that had always extended, in their geopolitical reckoning, from the Atlantic to the Urals.

What was needed at this fresh moment of oppression, however, was a new attitude. A fresh initiative. A plan for coping with the here and now of the in-house Soviet Stalinists. In the vulgar but vivid image used by
Jozef Swiatlo after he defected from Soviet Marxism to the West in 1953, Poland at this moment of its latest betrayal was like a virgin whose bedroom was filled with rapists. “Unless she has a plan,” said Swiatlo, “probably the sun will rise on the morrow, but surely she will no longer be a virgin on that morrow.”

Poland's plan was to be devised by Stefan Wyszynski. And as that plan unfolded, it was to be implemented in all of its wiliness and tenacity by his whole hierarchy.

Under Archbishop Adam Sapieha, Karol Wojtyla had learned to survive in the face of an enemy who dealt almost exclusively in gore and death. Hitler had decided to liquidate the Poles because he knew he could not change what they were as a people. Hitler's problem was that he was dedicated to evil. But he was not stupid.

During his years under Archbishop Stefan Wyszynski, the younger man would now begin to learn the hard, down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts lessons of how to live and cope day by day with forces irremovable by ethnic unity and intent upon snuffing out all allegiance to Polish
romanitas
and all religious faith itself.

At the outset, in 1948, Wojtyla was a parish priest in Krakow, still “wet behind the ears” and with much to learn. Quickly enough, however, he would come to be one of Wyszynski's most valued associates, once he was nominated Bishop. It took very little time for the two men to find the collaboration between them easy and fruitful. Wyszynski found that already, as a young Churchman, Wojtyla was thinking along universal lines—like himself—and that there was no hint of parochialism in Wojtyla. Added to this was Wojtyla's sense of timing and his wide knowledge of men and human affairs. The two men thought alike. In time, it would be Wojtyla who would be at the Archbishop's side through the thick of Stalinism and the thin of the world's pointed neglect of Poland.