What did Pope John Paul II do in World War II?
Last year I began to hear an odd retelling of the life of the youth who grew up to become Pope John Paul II. In this version Karol Wojtyla lived passively under the Nazi occupation of Poland and turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. I heard it first last year in a flawed PBS documentary, which had failed to get even basic facts about Wojtyla’s family relationships correct. In my review for the Post-Gazette, I wrote that it was reasonable to ask whether the 20-year-old Wojtyla could have done more to aid Jews — but limitations of space prevented me from adding that the film failed to explore the reasonable answers to that question. Then, in a recent speech, the Zionist scholar Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg — who was a source for the PBS documentary — reiterated that Wojtyla lived quietly during the war, did not defy the Nazis, and entered the priesthood as an escape from real life. He presents Wojtyla as a child of Polish anti-Semitism who later repented and began to defend Jews. I’m not Cat
