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What those who feared a Polish papacy did not realise was that Karol Wojtyla had never forgotten the terrible things that took place around him in his youth. Wadowice, the town near Cracow where he grew up, was more than 25 per cent Jewish when Karol was a child. He grew up with Jews, he lived in the same street as Jews and went to school with Jews. One of these was Jerzy Kluger, a Jew who many years later would play a key role as a go-between for John Paul II and Israel when the Vatican established diplomatic relations. Many years later, Kluger told the New York Times that the young Karol often went to the Kluger’s apartment overlooking the town square and listened to music performed by a string quartet comprising two Jews and two Catholics. ‘Previous popes did not know Jews,’ Jerzy Kluger told the New York Times , ‘but this pope is a friend of the Jewish people, because he knows Jewish people.’ In 1939 the Germans occupied Poland. In the next four years the great majority of Wadowice Jews were transported to the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where they were killed. The young Wojtyla, meanwhile, went to work in a stone quarry and later a chemical factory, thus avoiding being deported as a slave labourer for Germany. At the same time, he secretly studied for the priesthood. He knew the Jews of Wadowice were being deported to their deaths and, while he survived the war himself, most of the people whom he knew from that background in his youth did not. It might be said that, in many ways, he spent the rest of his life atoning for the fact that he survived but his friends did not. In the years between the Second World War and his election as Pope, Father Wojtyla was more concerned with saving the Polish Catholic Church, which suffered decades of persecution under the communist regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka, which Stalin imposed on Poland after the war. Poland remained a Catholic country under the rule of an atheist regime, and life for Catholics there was not easy. Wojtyla became a bishop in 1958 and the Archbishop of Cracow in 1963. He became known as one of the brightest of the church’s new generation of leaders and was made cardinal in 1967. The communists certainly underestimated him when they described him as a ‘poet and a dreamer’, just as Stalin’s contemptuous comment on ‘how many divisions does the Pope have’ was certainly a profound misjudgment of Catholicism. He attended the Second Vatican Council and, while he was not among the most outspoken reformers, he supported the reforms made by the council, including some of the changes I have spoken about. Once he became Pope, however, John Paul moved rapidly to change the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community. These relations were in an unhappy state, not least in Rome, where the inaction of Pope Pius XII when the Nazis deported the majority of Roman Jews to their deaths in 1943 was remembered with great bitterness. At an international level, the refusal of the Vatican to recognise Israel was also an unresolved problem. John Paul II took immediate steps to confront this situation, although it took a while to overcome the resistance of some in the institution he represented and, frankly, some of the suspicion in the Jewish community. John Paul II was the master of dramatic gesture. The first of these occurred during his 1979 tour of Poland, which did so much to undermine the communist regime in his homeland. John Paul went to Auschwitz and knelt in prayer there, making it clear that he was praying for millions of Jews who had died there. His next great gesture was to visit the Great Synagogue in Rome, where he embraced the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff, and spoke of the ‘irrevocable covenant’ between God and the Jews. He explicitly renounced and apologised for the church’s history of anti-Semitism. He said: ‘With Judaism we have a relationship that we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way it may be said that you are our elder brothers.’ I will return to that in a minute.