The Power of Relationships

By our second night in Poland, I felt like in the short time we had been there, we had already learned so much.

Though we were warned we would be jumping right into everything, I didn’t know what to expect. However, I can say that it definitely wasn’t the desecrated Jewish cemetery that we started our Oswiecim tour at shortly after our arrival at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer. Before we entered the cemetery, a naive thought crossed my mind – something like, “Wow, it’s amazing that this is still here,” thinking it was going to be a somewhat normal cemetery. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that this was not the case. Walking through it, past the chalk-numbered tombstones, crooked and close together, no longer marking where their corresponding bodies are actually buried, I was shocked, though with everything we’ve learned I probably shouldn’t have been. The Nazis had not only tried to break the spirit of the living Jews – exterminating them wasn’t enough; they also tried to destroy their memory. I think just seeing the destruction, seeing the pieces of broken-up stones that once commemorated the lives of human beings, seeing that in person, was just kind of insane. However, they didn’t succeed in this goal. The white-chalk numbers were written by those who volunteered to work towards restoration of the site to mark and count the stones. They didn’t succeed in destroying their memory. I thought that the Polish custom of leaving little lamps on the gravestones was beautiful, and especially considering how there is no longer a Jewish population here in Oswiecim, I thought it was amazing that there was a good number of these lamps around the cemetery. To me, this represents the progress that’s been made since the Shoah. Seeing how non-Jewish Poles still visit this cemetery, a site they could become desensitized to and forget about as it is in their neighborhood, and witnessing how they leave the lamps at these tombstones, still honoring their memory today, provided a little bit of light in the darkness of the still-present destruction.

            Someone who played a big role in this visible progress was Saint Pope John Paul II. I was so excited to go to Wadowice and see the town he grew up in and to visit his home and the parish he was raised in, the place where his faith was fostered. Arriving in Wadowice and going to see his high school was a very cool experience, but visiting the Old Synagogue and hearing the story of Lolek and Jurek was incredible. I thought it was a fascinating story – one full of friendship and hope – and it definitely shows the power that strong relationships create. They were childhood friends, Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II (Lolek) and Jerzy Kluger (Jurek), and one particular story told of how when Jurek got his acceptance letter, the two were so happy they would be attending high school together. They understood from a young age that they were equals, and their religious difference didn’t stop their great friendship or the good relations between their families. However, after they graduated from high school, the war caused them to lose touch, as Jurek had to leave Wadowice with his father to escape capture and a terrible fate. He joined the Polish army heading towards Russia and survived the war. In 1951, he ended up in Rome with his wife, and when John Paul II went to Rome in the 1960s for the Second Vatican Council and was made a Cardinal, the two reconnected. Amazingly, their bond was so strong that it was as if time had never passed, and after all that had happened and all they had gone through separately, they came together in mutual love, understanding, and respect and worked towards mending Jewish-Christian relations.

Klugar contributed a lot to the impact that John Paul II was able to make during the Second Vatican Council, which can be seen in the Nostra Aetate that Pope Paul VI published in 1965. It is a “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.” This document specifically highlights that Jews are not to blame for Jesus’ death, and it points out similarities as well as promotes respect between different religions. This story of friendship is so powerful – the two men went from being childhood friends to being an unbeatable team that worked towards unity after a long war that encouraged disunity. I wish it was a more well-known story because I feel like it has the power to open a lot of minds to the idea of how powerful human relationships can be and are. This depiction of the power relations can hold only reinforces why the reparation of Jewish-Christian relations is so important. Restoring the relationship between Jews and Christians and mending it into one that embodies understanding just as Lolek’s and Jurek’s did can help to create a more respectful and peaceful environment and promote mutually beneficial conversations.