Quarry blaster tells the future Saint John Paul II to be a priest

KRAKÓW, September 1940 AD — This September Karol Wojtyła, who was later to become Saint John Paul II, went to work as a labourer in the Solvay chemical works’ limestone quarry at Zakrzówek, in Kraków. The wage kept him and his father, and the job kept him from being deported to forced labour in Germany. He was twenty. Until last November he had been a student of Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University. Then the Germans arrested its professors, sent them to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and closed the university.

Poland had been under German occupation for a year. The occupying authorities ordered every Pole between eighteen and sixty to work. Wojtyła’s father, also named Karol Wojtyła, was a retired army lieutenant, and army pensions had been stopped for the duration of the war.

His mother had died in 1929 AD and his only brother in 1932 AD. Since then father and son had lived alone, and in 1938 AD they had moved from Wadowice to Kraków so that he could study there. They lived in a two-room basement flat at 10 Tyniecka Street, in the Dębniki district, in a house owned by his mother’s brother. The quarry was about half an hour’s walk away, and Wojtyła walked there every day.

The foremen were Polish, and they tried to spare the students the heaviest jobs. They made Wojtyła assistant to Franciszek Labus, an older workman whose job was setting off the explosive charges.

Now and then Labus would turn to him and say: “Karol, you ought to be a priest. You’ll sing well, because you have a fine voice, and you’ll be well off…” Labus meant it plainly; he was repeating a common belief of the time that priests lived comfortably. Wojtyła wrote long afterwards: “The old workman’s words stayed fixed in my memory.”

The work was heavy. Day after day beside men who did hard labour for a living, Wojtyła learned what physical exhaustion was. The workmen knew he was a student who meant to go back to his studies as soon as he could, and none of them held it against him. Sixteen years later he wrote a poem about the quarry that recalls “the even rhythm of the hammers, so familiar.”

During that year at Zakrzówek, Wojtyła later wrote, “I was present when, during the explosion of a dynamite charge, the stones struck a workman and killed him. I was deeply shaken by it.” In a section of the quarry poem that he called “In Memory of a Fellow Worker,” he set down what the other men did next: “They lifted the body. They filed past in silence. From him there still came weariness and a sense of injustice.”