Just as Americans remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news of President John Kennedy’s assassination or the terror attacks of Sept. 11, Poles tend to mark their personal and national milestones by the visits of Karol Wojtyla.
It was easy for Bronislaw Geremek to recall his whereabouts during Wojtyla’s second visit to Poland as Pope John Paul II, in 1983.
The bearded, pipe-smoking university professor and Solidarity activist who would later become his country’s foreign minister was in Warsaw’s Rakowiecka prison when the pope was celebrating mass in a jampacked soccer stadium a few miles away.
Martial law had been suspended but not yet lifted.
“I was in a cell with normal criminals,” he told me in an interview several years ago.
“A prison is usually a very noisy place. There is noise coming from inside the prison and noise from the city outside–this constant noise–but on that day, everything was silent,” he said.
“We all knew the pope was just a few kilometers away. In my memory, this long space of silence was the beginning of hope–the hope which gave birth to democracy,” he said.
As the Tribune’s Warsaw correspondent in the mid-1990s and later as Rome correspondent for nearly six years, I witnessed several of Pope John Paul II’s nine visits to Poland. For me, the most memorable was the last, in August 2002.
It’s difficult to describe the intense, profoundly emotional relationship between the pope and his fellow Poles, but I could feel it in an almost physical way on the morning of Aug. 18, when he celebrated mass before a crowd of 2.5 million in a vast grassy field on the outskirts of Krakow, the city where he had served as archbishop.
The crowd began assembling in the Blonia Krakowskie, the Krakow Commons, the night before the mass. I got up at dawn the day of the mass, and already the cobbled streets in the medieval university town were filled with pilgrims, all heading in the same direction.
As we moved away from the center of the city, the crowds grew even larger. One had the sensation of being swept along in a slow-moving but unstoppable river of humanity.
People carried flags and banners and lawn chairs and picnic baskets. Every house and every shop we walked past had at least one window that had been transformed into a shrine to the pope.
The river finally emptied us into a vast sea of humanity. The throng that had gathered at the Blonia Krakowskie was now so large that it dwarfed the multistory stage that would serve as an altar. The crowd stretched to the horizon.
Hours before the mass was scheduled to begin, loudspeakers informed the gathering that the pope, too, had arisen early and had prayed for an unusually long time in preparation for this mass.
When he finally arrived in his popemobile, the crowd broke into ecstatic chants of “We love you” and “You are home.” By this time, it was clear to all that Pope John Paul II was a gravely ill man. Both he and his audience sensed that this would be their last time together.
At the end of the three-hour mass, he said, “I want to thank [Krakow] for the hospitality and I would also like to add, `See you again,’ but I leave this entirely in God’s hands.”
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Many in the crowd wept.
I was near a middle-age steelworker who told me that he had stood in the same spot 23 years earlier during the pope’s first visit to Poland. This time he brought his 10-year-old daughter so she might catch a glimpse of the man her father said was “the most important person in the world, in the country and privately for us, in our family.”
At the airport the next day, John Paul II paused on the tarmac before mounting the steps to his plane.
“I hate to go,” he said. Those would be his final words in Poland.
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