The Pope and I

the long version

At first blush, a pope and a Holocaust survivor might not seem to have much in common. But this remarkable volume finds common ground in what may appear to be unlikely territory. Karol Lolek Wojtyla, a young Pole, and Jerzy Jurek Kluger, another young Pole, formed a friendship in grade school in the Polish town of Wadowice. Then their paths went separate waysKluger survived the horrors of the Holocaust while Wojtyla would become the future John Paul IIbut despite their differences and the years apart, they remained friends. (Kluger caught up with the then Archbishop Wojtyla in Rome during Vatican II.) Given the friendship, it is perhaps not terribly surprising that John Paul II earned a reputation as a friend of Judaism: the first pope since Saint Peter to visit and pray with Jews in the Great Synagogue of Rome, the first to visit Auschwitz, and the first to make a personal pilgrimage as well as an official state visit to Israel. This often touching memoir should be of interest to Catholics and Jews and, really, anyone interested in a remarkable friendship.