Early life of Pope John Paul II

Karol Józef Wojtyła (jr) was born on 18 May 1920 in Wadowice near the city of Kraków in southern Poland, the youngest of three children.

[5] He reflected on this fifty years later, in a speech he made at the Jagiellonian University: "These are events that became deeply engraved in my memory, my brother's death perhaps even deeper than my mother's death—equally because of the special circumstances, one may say tragic ones, and in view of my greater maturity at the time.

"[5] On Thursday, 10 October 2019, the Polish Episcopal Conference formally announced that they would petition the Holy See for permission to begin the cause for beatification and canonization of Karol Sr. and Emilia at the local level, in the Archdiocese of Kraków.

[8][9] School football games were often organised between teams of Jews and Catholics, and due to the anti-Jewish feelings of the time, there was a potential for events to sometimes turn "nasty".

He became close to a girl called Ginka Beer, described as "a Jewish beauty, with stupendous eyes and jet black hair, slender, a superb actress.

[12] Papal biographer George Weigel recalls that when Karol was around 15 years old, a young person playfully pointed a gun at him not realising that it was loaded.

In his freshman year, Wojtyła studied philosophy, Polish language and literature, introductory Russian, and Old Church Slavonic.

He worked as a volunteer librarian and did compulsory military training in the Academic Legion, but refused to hold or fire a weapon.

At the end of the 1938-39 academic year, he played Sagittarius in a fantasy-fable, The Moonlight Cavalier, produced by an experimental theatre troupe.

The German officers tending the injured Wojtyła, and the decision to commandeer a passing truck for use as an ambulance for the unconscious patient, is in sharp contrast to the harshness normally expected from occupying forces during this period.

Wojtyła escaped by hiding behind a door as the Gestapo searched the house he lived in, and fled to the Archbishop's residence, where he stayed until after the war.

Wojtyła and another seminarian volunteered for the odious task of chopping up and carting away piles of frozen excrement from the lavatories.

[13] In the same month of that year, Wojtyła personally helped a 14-year-old Jewish refugee girl named Edith Zierer[15] who had run away from a Nazi labour camp in Częstochowa.