Although Karol Wojtyła would later mine his experience of the quarry for his literary, philosophical, and theological purposes, the fact remains that this was hard and dangerous work. Every day, each worker had to fill one of the small tramcars with limestone. The new worker-students couldn’t meet this quota, but the sympathetic quarry management could only reduce the quotas. The limestone still had to be broken up and shoveled, hour after hour. The one break each day was for breakfast. Food had to be brought from home and usually consisted of tough bread with jam and ersatz coffee. Lolek and Kydryński, sometimes managed to get into a small hut in the pit where there was an iron stove to warm themselves and their coffee briefly. The rules said that they could take only one break for fifteen minutes per day; in practice, they managed to slip away every couple of hours or so to try to get warm. The quarrymen, Kydryński, remembered, were good Poles, who didn’t scorn the students but rather sympathized with their being forced into this kind of backbreaking work in order to avoid deportation to Germany.47
The workday at Zakrzówek lasted from early in the morning until 3 P.M., after which Lolek, dressed in denims and clogs, walked home with whatever he had managed to scrounge at the quarry and elsewhere for his father and himself: some coal, a few potatoes, perhaps some cabbages or peas. The young quarryman’s salary, meager as it was, was the family’s only income since the Nazis had stopped the captain’s pension.
In October 1941, Karol Wojtyła was transferred to the Solvay chemical factory in Borek Fałęcki, a somewhat longer walk from Dębniki but a major improvement in his working conditions. At Borek Fałęcki, he worked in the plant’s water purification unit, often taking the night shift. It was easier to read then, in between lugging buckets of lime hanging from a wooden yoke over his shoulders. The plant workers could also take advantage of a modest food service, which fed them a half-liter of soup and a few ounces of bread during their shifts.
Despite the reticence caused by the omnipresent danger of the Gestapo, the working conditions at Borek Fałęcki meant that Lolek could talk with his fellow workers. He sometimes debated religious issues with a man named Mankowski, an atheist and a member of the Polish Socialist Party. Fellow workers also remember Karol Wojtyła praying on his knees at the Borek Fałęcki plant, unafraid of ridicule and seemingly able to tune out the racket around him to concentrate on his conversation with God. On his way home to Dębniki he frequently stopped at the parish in Podgórze run by the Redemptorist priests, to pray or to attend early morning Mass after completing the night shift. “From here,” he recalled thirty years later, “I gained the strength to last through the difficult times of the years of Occupation.”48
During the long nights at Borek Fałęcki, Karol Wojtyła came to a new appreciation of the Marian piety that had long characterized Polish Catholicism. In his early manhood, he later wrote, he thought he ought to “distance” himself a bit from the kinds of devotion to Mary he had encountered as a boy in order to “focus more on Christ.”49 While tending the water purification machinery at the Solvay plant he read the works of St. Louis Grignon de Montfort, an eighteenth-century French preacher, who taught Wojtyła that “true devotion to Mary” was always focused on Christ.50 Mary was the first disciple; indeed, Mary’s fiat (“Be it done unto me according to thy word” [Luke 1.38]) and its unique role in the Incarnation of the Son of God had made discipleship possible for others. To be a disciple of Christ was to be like Mary, prepared to dispose oneself utterly to the will of God. Marian piety was authentic when it led beyond Mary to a more intense relationship with Christ, which meant with the Holy Trinity itself. Marian piety was a special path into “the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption.”51
The Zakrzówek quarry and the Solvay factory introduced Karol Wojtyła to a world he had never known before, the world of the industrial laborer, the robotnik as he was called in Polish. The kinds of men he encountered—from łabuś the blaster, to the workmen at the water purification plant who intuitively understood that study was work and covered for him so that he could continue his surreptitious reading uninterrupted—were not the kind of people he had known in Wadowice or in the academic and literary world of Kraków. Although there were some rough customers among them, what struck the young Wojtyła most about these men was their innate dignity, which expressed itself in friendliness and a willingness to help others despite their own hard circumstances. Others would theorize about the nature and aspirations of the urban proletariat. Thanks to four years of breaking rocks at Zakrzówek and hauling buckets of lime at Borek Fałęcki, Karol Wojtyła knew these men, “their living situations, their families, their interests, their human worth” from inside.52
From that inside perspective, the young rock breaker began to think more deeply about the meaning of work itself. The Catholic piety with which he had grown up held that backbreaking work was one of the curses of original sin, one of the enduring punishments for Adam and Eve’s defiance of God. His experience of the quarry eventually led Karol Wojtyła to a different view. Work, with all its rigors and hardships, was a participation in God’s creativity, because work touched the very essence of the human being as the creature to whom God had given dominion over the earth. Fifteen years later, he tried to grasp this dimension of his experience in the pit at Zakrzówek poetically:
Listen, when cadences of knocking hammers so much their own
I transfer into our inner life, to test the strength of each blow—
Listen: electric current cuts through a river of rock—
Then the thought grows in me day after day,
The whole greatness of this work dwells inside a man.53
“Inside” man is, of course, a complicated place. Wojtyła’s 1956 poem about his experience as a manual laborer is built around the tension between love and anger that was, in his mature view, the warp and woof of work as a specifically human activity. Animals are busy; only people work. We work because we love—our families, our children, all those for whom we work and who depend on our work. Yet work involves wrestling with the unyielding material of the earth, and that wrestling can give birth to what Wojtyła styles
…a fundamental anger which flows into people’s breath like a river bent by the wind.54
Anger is also a result of exploitation and the disloyalty of fellow workers. In the world of work, love and anger are inseparable, and to enter into the human experience of work is to live in this unescapable tension, in this “lever of anger and love.” The tension is part of the “inner structure” of the world. It is, simply, the way things are.
Life and life’s meaning are intensely personal, and even the man who dies tragically (as did a fellow quarryman whose accidental death left a “profound impression” on the young Wojtyła55) has transcended the blandness of being a generic robotnik, because in his uniquely personal way, he “took with him the inner structure of the world/in which love will explode higher if a greater anger penetrates it.”56 The built-in tensions of work, Wojtyła suggests, find their resolution in the transcendent dignity of the worker, who can never be reduced to a mere unit of production.
A SPIRITUAL MOUNTAINEER
Mysticism is a dimension of religious experience at once magnetically attractive and virtually impenetrable. Mystics write about their experiences, but at the heart of any genuine mystical experience there is something that a third party cannot share. In the Carmelite tradition, for example, the highest level of mystical knowledge is to know that there is nothing to be said about God.
During his second year of life in occupied Kraków, Karol Wojtyła was introduced to this world of intense religious contemplation as a direct result of the Nazi attack on Poland’s Catholic clergy.
The parish of St. Stanisław Kostka in Dębniki was led by the Salesian Fathers, a religious community founded by St. John Bosco. It was a dynamic parish in which the Salesians placed great emphasis on youth work. At the risk of their lives, the priests tried to continue this apostolate during the early years of the
Occupation, conducting underground catechetical programs for elementary and high school students. The Germans systematically stripped the parish of its clergy, and on May 23, 1941, the Gestapo rounded up all but two of the remaining Salesians, shipping the others to concentration camps, where eleven died, including the pastor, Father Jan Świerc. As the Nazi pressure on St. Stanisław Kostka’s youth work increased, the Salesians turned to laymen to lead what had now become a clandestine ministry. The most successful of these lay leaders was a man named Jan Tyranowski, whose confessor once described him as a “spiritual Alpinist.”57
Born on February 9, 1901, Jan Tyranowski completed elementary school and sufficient years of business school to begin working as an accountant. His nervous disposition did not lend itself to that trade so, like his father and grandfather before him, Tyranowski learned tailoring and supported himself in the family business. Of medium height, with a full head of wavy hair, he sported a brush mustache and was always properly, even elegantly, turned out.
A shy personality with a somewhat delicate constitution, he might have lived a conventionally reclusive life. Then, in 1935, the already devout Tyranowski heard a sermon at St. Stanisław Kostka in which one of the Salesians said, “It’s not difficult to be a saint.” That simple phrase stuck in his mind, and the tailor of Dębniki began to regularize his spiritual life in a systematic fashion. He also made a vow of celibacy, despite the interest in marriage which at least one woman in the parish had expressed to him. By the time of the Occupation, he was living a daily schedule of prayer and meditation more strict than that observed by many religious orders.58 A methodical man, Tyranowski wrote out the framework for his meditations in a set of notebooks he kept in a fine, almost calligraphic hand. But he was not dedicated to order and method in prayer as ends in themselves. For Jan Tyranowski, the goal of contemplative prayer was a release from thoughts and images, a certain freedom to simply be in God’s presence.59
Karol Wojtyła met Jan Tyranowski in 1940, perhaps in February, and probably at one of the weekly Saturday meetings of young people at the parish. Tyranowski, a largely self-taught man who had read broadly in Catholic spirituality and whose modest flat on Rózana Street contained an impressive library of spiritual classics in several languages, quickly became one of the lay leaders of these discussions.60 To the young men of Dębniki, Tyranowski could seem rather formal at first, speaking somewhat like a walking catechism text. Yet the gentle tailor-mystic, who had made a considerable study of psychology on his own, somehow managed to communicate to these young men that the points of doctrine they were discussing were not abstractions for him, but the objects of his daily experience.61 It was a powerful, almost irresistible, quality.62 After the May 1941 Gestapo raid, the remaining Salesian parish priest at St. Stanisław Kostka asked Tyranowski to begin forming a group of young men who could continue the parish’s youth ministry in the absence of the clergy. Thus was born the “Living Rosary,” with Karol Wojtyła as one of the first leaders.
The Living Rosary as created by Jan Tyranowski consisted of groups of fifteen young men, each of which was led by a more mature youngster who received personal spiritual direction and instruction from the mystically gifted tailor. Tyranowski met with the entire Living Rosary organization every third Sunday of the month and was also available to any member of a Living Rosary group as needed. As new members joined the program, new groups were formed and a new leader chosen from outstanding members of an existing group. In weekly, hour-long meetings in his apartment, Tyranowski taught his group leaders both the fundamentals of the spiritual life and methods for systematically examining and improving their daily lives. Jan Tyranowski’s approach to the interior life included an apostolic dimension. The practice of the presence of God, he taught his young charges, should lead to an intensified life of service to others. Members of the Living Rosary pledged themselves to a life of intensified prayer as brothers in Christ who would help one another in all the circumstances of their lives—as workers, as students (Karol Wojtyła tutored Mieczysław Maliński in Latin after they met in the Living Rosary), in the difficulties of their family lives.
By 1943, some sixty young men, the youngest of whom was fourteen, were involved in the Living Rosary. Four group leaders, or “animators,” among them, Karol Wojtyła, were responsible to Tyranowski. All of this was clandestine, the Germans being particularly paranoid about youth groups as possible breeding grounds for anti-Occupation conspiracies. The Gestapo once raided Tyranowski’s apartment during a Living Rosary meeting. No one knows what the tailor said, but he evidently convinced the raiders that no conspiracy was afoot and the Germans left.63
It was, of course, a conspiracy, but of a different sort. The Living Rosary groups also discussed how Poland might be reconstituted as a Christian society after the war. Those discussions included sharp arguments with representatives of partisan groups advocating violent resistance to the Germans, and, sometimes, Mieczysław Maliński recalled, a member of the Living Rosary disappeared “‘into the woods’ occasionally they would return afterwards for a brief spell, and then be heard of no more.”64
For the young Karol Wojtyła and his friends in the first Living Rosary groups, Tyranowski represented a unique lay combination of personal holiness and apostolic zeal, a kind of life “that was completely unknown to us before.” What drew them to him was his ability to “shape souls” by showing how “religious truths” were “not interdictions [or] limitations” but the means to form “a life which through mercy becomes [a] participation in the life of God.” To do this with adolescents—with their distinctive combination of self-assurance and self-doubt—was no mean accomplishment. And it seems to have been a matter of personal example as much as formal teaching. As Karol Wojtyła later wrote, his way of life “proved that one could not only inquire about God but that one could live with God.”
Tyranowski was the retail apostle par excellence. There was something startling about him, a “sort of strange relentlessness” that created a “bowstring of tension” between the master and his disciples. But it was the relentlessness of love, in which the depth of an individual’s conversion to Christ was the key index of achievement.65
Leading a Living Rosary group, which meant taking a measure of responsibility for the lives of fifteen other young men, was one important factor in Karol Wojtyła’s rapid maturation. In addition, Jan Tyranowski’s personal sanctity exemplified the apostolic possibilities of a lay vocation, and helped confirm Wojtyła in the view that holiness did not reside solely inside the sanctuary rail or in the parish priests’ house. You did not spend hours with Jan Tyranowski, who, as John Paul II later said, “lived a very personal experience of God,” and not conclude that sanctity was everyone’s vocation in the Church.66 Tyranowski also deepened young Wojtyła’s experience of prayer. Karol had always prayed. Now he prayed as a means of entering God’s presence so that that experience animated every aspect of life, not merely his moments of contemplation.
Tyranowski’s most enduring contribution to Karol Wojtyła’s life and thinking was to introduce the young student-worker to St. John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish reformer of the Carmelite order who was declared a Doctor of the Church (Catholicism’s greatest acknowledgment of theological creativity) in 1926. The tailor must have sensed that the Spanish mystic’s poetry would appeal to young Wojtyła, and that first taste of the literary fruits of Carmelite mysticism soon led to Karol’s reading St. John’s major theological works: The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night of the Soul, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love.67
Carmelite mysticism is a spirituality of abandonment. The “dark night” is the purification through which the soul must go in order to achieve communion with God. One learns to lay aside the hope for reward and to be drawn forward by God’s grace for its own sake. In the dark night, God can seem absent. In the dark night, like Jesus in the desert and on the cross, one abandons every other security and plunges into a kind of radical empt
iness, on the far side of which is the intense peace of mystical communion with God himself, a communion of shared “presence,” devoid of imagery and concepts. In this spiritual tradition, the living, loving God is beyond the reach of feeling, imagination, or thought. God can only be known in himself when all of our human attempts to “reach” God are abandoned in complete self-surrender, which is an act of complete love.
It was an approach to the human condition as radically opposed to the Nazi will-to-power as could be imagined. Under the tutelage of the unexpected apostle, Jan Tyranowski, and amid the madnesses of the Occupation, the imitation of Christ through the complete handing over of every worldly security to the merciful will of God seized Karol Wojtyła’s imagination. Over time, it would become the defining characteristic of his own discipleship.68
RESISTANCE THROUGH CULTURE: THE RHAPSODIC THEATER
At the same time that he was getting his first taste of manual labor and taking his first steps in mysticism, Karol Wojtyła became more immersed in theater than he would ever be again.
Karol and his literary friends were determined that the German attempt to stamp out Polish culture would not deter them. In fact, the deliberate effort to decapitate Poland seemed to charge these young actors and authors with an even more intense sense of purpose. In October 1939, a few weeks after returning from his trek to Poland’s eastern borderlands, Karol and his Jagiellonian classmates, Juliusz Kydryński, and Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, joined by Danuta Michałowska, a high school student passionate about the theater, met at the Kydryński,s’ home to recite classic Polish texts, each taking different parts.69 Two months later, Karol wrote his first play, David, which has been lost. A letter to Mieczysław Kotlarczyk described it as a “dramatic poem, or drama, partly biblical, partly rooted in Polish history,” in which the apprentice playwright had “bared many things, many matters of my soul.”70
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