I arrived at night by train
I arrived at night by train the first time I ever came to Krakow: April 8, 2005. Thousands of fiery candles illuminated its medieval alleys. All along the Vistula River, wrapping around the Wawel Castle, and meandering through every lonely lane leading to St. Mary’s Basilica on the market square, the leisurely melting tallow offered its radiance to the dark.
Not being Catholic, and not carrying the internet in my pocket, I didn’t know it had been the day of Pope John Paul II’s funeral. I had only the vaguest sense he was Polish and none at all of his connection to Krakow: born in a small neighboring town, he moved here to attend Jagiellonian University but his studies were interrupted by the war, through which he worked a series of menial jobs to avoid deportation to Germany while attending an underground seminary at night. Ordained in now communist Poland, where being called Father in public would have marked him out as conducting ministry illegally, he went by Wujek (Uncle). Once he returned to Poland as Pope in 1979, he prayed in public, “Do not be afraid. Let your spirit descend and change the image of the land…this land.”
Krakow was also the home of Oskar Schindler’s factory, and the city closest to the place where the Nazis marked the gate “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free).
War forces terrible sacrifices upon those least complicit in triggering its awful consequences. The refugees who have made it as far as our hotel in Krakow do not arrive bursting with false bravado for the glory of Ukraine. They arrive full of fear for their husbands and fathers at home, anxiety for the future of their children, and terror at the horrors they have witnessed. Always the proxies suffer: the Ukrainians bear the sacrifice for the entirety of the Western world, so that the rest of us are not (yet) directly endangered by this conflict.
The Polish have responded admirably to the sacrifice of their neighbors, as a nation taking in close to 3 million refugees so far, and as individuals welcoming them into their homes, feeding them, and caring for them. Zero Camps began with the goal of helping ensure there would be no need for refugee tent camps in Poland, and the kindness of so many Polish families is making this goal a reality.
This story is not about the Pope or Catholicism. It is a story about a Polish man named Karol Wojtyla, who by the age of 20 was alone in the world after losing his entire family, endured two accidents which crippled him for life, studied his faith in secret, hid in a basement from the Gestapo as they rounded up 8000 young men in Krakow, carried a Jewish girl in his arms to safety, declined to baptize another Jewish orphan whose parents had died in the Holocaust and instead helped him find Jewish relatives in the US who could raise him in the faith of his parents, and ultimately inspired and sustained the Solidarity movement which sparked Poland to free itself from the totalitarian grip of the Soviets. In opening their hearts to their Ukrainian neighbors the Polish have honored the legacy of untold ancestors of all faiths and none who suffered and sacrificed to deliver to their descendants an independent, peaceful and prosperous Poland, and changed the image of their land.
Anyone who has ever read their kid a children’s book, whose stories are told more in pictures than in words, can appreciate the symbolism of those thousands of wax tapers aflame, the urgency of their blaze shining through even the darkness of death, and piercing the fabric of eternity.
