Pope’s Trip to His Homeland Proves to Be a Moving Journey : Poland: John Paul II visits his family’s graves and blesses youngsters at the Polish-American Children’s Hospital in Krakow.

On the road again, Pope John Paul II came home to Poland on Tuesday for a nostalgic and emotional visit that improbably began with a strong American accent.

Embarking on the 52nd foreign trip of his reign and his fifth to Poland, the 71-year-old pontiff knelt in prayer for about five minutes before the gray-black marble tombstone where his family lies in a cemetery on the outskirts of town.

Krakow, an industrial and agricultural center of 750,000 in southern Poland a two-hour flight from Rome, was, under communism, the longtime home of Karol Wojtyla as a priest, a bishop and a cardinal before his election to the papacy in 1978.

One of the Pope’s friends, former electrician and now President Lech Walesa, was on hand to greet John Paul Tuesday on a soft summer day as he began what for protocolary reasons the Vatican and the Polish government agree is an extension of a June pastoral visit.

A litany of black-cowled nuns joined the Pope in prayer at the grave of his mother, Emilia, who died in 1929; his brother Edmond, who, as a 26-year-old doctor, contracted a fatal case of scarlet fever from a patient he was treating in 1932, and his father, Karol, who died at age 62 in 1941 and was the key formative figure in the life of the future Pope.

“My father was a great influence, because my mother died when I was still a boy--before my first Communion. He was like both a mother and father to me, a profound and religious man,” John Paul told reporters at the cemetery. “From him I learned the mystery of the infinite majesty of God. . . .”

Relaxed, obviously glad to be home, the Pope paid a long visit to Krakow’s Polish-American Children’s Hospital to bless a new ambulatory wing named after the late Rep. Clement Zablocki of Milwaukee.

The $150-million facility was built with U.S. government funds and private donations and is administered by Project HOPE, a private U.S. relief agency. President Bush, who as vice president toured the site as construction began in 1987, sent a letter hailing the new center as “a symbol of the cooperative efforts of our two countries in economic matters, in health and environmental protection programs . . . that will help to provide a secure future for free and democratic Poland.”

Representing Congress at the opening, Rep. Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said the Zablocki center “exemplifies the entire concept of democratic effort: people working together to help themselves.”

John Paul broke into rusty English to note that the hospital was launched 25 years ago “in spite of the ideological difference which divided the world and even in defiance of the hostility incited in these later years between the East and the West.”

About 150 young patients sang to the Pope from seats on the floor, from wheelchairs and stretchers in the bright, airy lobby of the new wing. Some of the children were bald from radiation treatments. Others watched with bright eyes from withered bodies. All are suffering from cancer, leukemia or liver disease, doctors said.

When their recital had finished, the Pope moved purposefully among the children. Slowly, methodically, he walked back and forth, bending, soothing, touching.

By the time he had finished, John Paul had laid hands on every single one of the children who had come to greet him in the hospital that America built.