The dynamite man kept telling his helper: be a priest

KRAKÓW, September 1940 AD — In September 1940 AD, a twenty-year-old student went to work in a limestone quarry at Zakrzówek, in Kraków. His name was Karol Wojtyła, and he was later to become Saint John Paul II. The job kept him from being sent away to forced labour in Germany. His pay kept him and his father.

The year the university closed

Germany had been occupying Poland for a year. Until the November before, Wojtyła had studied Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University. Then the Germans arrested its professors and sent them to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They closed the university.

The Germans also ordered every Pole between eighteen and sixty to work.

Wojtyła’s mother had died in 1929 AD. His only brother died in 1932 AD. Since then he had lived alone with his father, who was also named Karol Wojtyła. In 1938 AD the two of them moved from Wadowice to Kraków so that he could study there. They lived in a two-room basement flat. His father was a retired army lieutenant. But army pensions had been stopped for as long as the war lasted.

The dynamite man’s advice

The quarry was about half an hour’s walk from the flat, and Wojtyła walked there every day. The foremen were Polish, and they tried to keep the students off the heaviest jobs. They made Wojtyła the helper of an older workman, Franciszek Labus. Labus was the quarry’s blaster, the man who set off the explosive charges.

The work was heavy all the same. Wojtyła worked every day beside men who did hard labour for a living. He found out how worn out a body can get. The workmen knew he was a student who meant to go back to his studies, and none of them held it against him.

That year at the quarry, 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.” Sixteen years later he wrote a poem about the quarry. He called one part of it “In Memory of a Fellow Worker,” and there he set down what the other men did next: “They lifted the body. They filed past in silence.”

Now and then Labus, the dynamite man, would turn to Wojtyła 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 was repeating what many people believed at the time. They thought priests were well off.

Long afterwards, Wojtyła wrote: “The old workman’s words stayed fixed in my memory.”