Old Playmates Recall Pope’s Bond With Jews

The last time Yosef Bienenstock saw his old childhood friend Karol Wojtyla, war loomed over their Polish homeland. It was the late 1930s, and Karol had come home to Wadowice during a break in his studies. A few months later, Yosef was arrested and shipped from one Nazi concentration camp to another.

Of his 12-member immediate family, only Yosef and a sister survived. Karol went on to become Pope John Paul II. And today, the two men will meet again when the pope speaks at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.

John Paul has done more to repair Jewish-Christian relations than any previous pope, and his appearance at Yad Vashem is intended to solidify the transformation and, perhaps, atone for the Roman Catholic Church’s inaction during the Holocaust.

When he speaks, he will be flanked by Bienenstock and a small group of former residents of Wadowice, the hometown they share. All the Jews are people who survived wartime Poland and have since made their home in Israel. About 30 Wadowice Jews live in Israel today, from a community that numbered 2,000 until the war.

Those who, like Bienenstock, knew the young Catholic boy who would become pope recall a friend who had an unusual bond with his Jewish neighbors, who had an appreciation for Jewish culture and who enjoyed slipping into the local synagogue to hear the cantor.

“Lolek,” as the pope was known as a child, would place a kippa on his head and blend in with the congregation. “He had more Jewish friends than the average Catholic boy,” Bienenstock said. “It was a bit unusual.”

Yosef, the son of a devout Jew, and Lolek, son of a devout Catholic, were neighbors and classmates and played together from about age 3. The rascal Bienenstock remembers his friend letting him copy his homework, while gently urging him to study harder.

They would play soccer or games with stones or buttons. When they didn’t have any buttons, some of the boys would steal them from women’s coats as they stood in line at the cinema. But not Lolek--that’s just the way he was: a good kid; a quiet, bookish kid.

“He was born that way,” Bienenstock said. “Gifted. Calm. He never fought with other children. Even in soccer, we’d all play really aggressively. But not him. He’d be the goalie.”

Another of the pope’s childhood friends, Jerzy Kluger, who now lives in Rome and still sees John Paul frequently, also remembered an unusually mature and generous child.

As a youngster looking for his playmate Lolek, he said, he once entered a Catholic church in Wadowice and was scolded by one of the parishioners. As a Jew, she told him, he should not be there.

“Lolek heard me and asked me, ‘What did the lady want from you?’ ” Kluger told an Israeli newspaper this week. “I told him what she said. He waited until I finished and then said, ‘Next time you see her, tell her that we are all God’s children.’ ”

Bienenstock said the anti-Semitism in prewar Wadowice was not as overt as in some places, and that Jews and Catholics lived in relative harmony. “There were times Jewish kids fought with Catholic kids,” he said, “but it didn’t seem so dangerous yet.”

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, everything changed, of course. Lolek had already left town to go to college and only came back for occasional visits between 1936 and 1939. This period was the last time Bienenstock saw his old friend.

Now 80, with still-thick silver hair and a hearing aid, Bienenstock survived the horrors of three death camps and lived to marry a Polish Jewish woman he met in one of the camps. The two moved 54 years ago to the first kibbutz established in what would become Israel, learned Hebrew, raised three children and have seven grandchildren.

An act of kindness decades after the war stands out for Bienenstock. Returning in 1992 to Wadowice to retrieve the remains of a long-dead younger brother, Bienenstock was startled to find that the rusted tin grave marker he expected to see had been replaced by a fine marble tombstone. John Paul had ordered it installed when, on his own pilgrimage home, he had seen the Bienenstock name in what was left of the old Jewish cemetery.

Bienenstock spoke in a weekend interview at his seaside home, which is full of antique clocks reflecting his career as a watchmaker like his father and his father before him. He lectures to high school groups about the Holocaust and visits Holocaust survivors who are confined to mental asylums.

He is full of praise for the pope--so much so that he received an angry phone call the other day from someone telling him to stop speaking so highly of the pontiff, lest Jews be encouraged to convert. He laughed it off.

When Bienenstock sees Lolek today, he said, he wants to shake his hand, hug him and ask him to continue working for peace between Jews and Catholics. And he wants the pope to see in his old neighbors a monument to survival and human resilience.

“I’m sure he’s proud of what we’ve done here.”