Karol Jozef Wojtyla (top left), the future Pope John Paul II, as a schoolboy, circa 1930.
He was born in Wadowice, a small town 50 kilometers from Krakow, on May 18, 1920. He was the second of two sons born to Karol Wojtyla, an army sergeant, and Emilia Kaczorowska. Karol lost his mother in 1929 and eldest brother Edmund, a doctor, in 1932. His father died in 1941. He was suddenly all alone.
'It gave direction to his life,' close friend Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete noted on PBS recently. 'Not only did it set him free from family responsibilities, but I believe, most important, somehow he believes this suffering involved not only his own, but by those who died, provided part of the energy that has compelled him to move.'
On graduation from the Marcin Wadowita high school in Wadowice, he enrolled in Krakow's Jagiellonian University in 1938 and in a school for drama. Nothing interested him more then than outdoor sport and the theatre. None who knew young Karol in Wadowice foresaw that his future would lie in the Church; they always thought he would be an actor.
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