|A Personal Glimpse of the Pope’s Belief in Life By Roger Cohen
Here is a family story of Pope John Paul II, an intimate tale of
his humanity. During the summer of 1942, two women in Krakow,
Poland, were denounced as Jews, taken to the city's prison, held
there for a few months and then sent to the Belzec death camp,
where in October they were killed in primitive Nazi gas chambers
by carbon monoxide from diesel engines. Their names were Frimeta
Gelband and Salomea Zierer; they were sisters. As it happens,
Frimeta was my wife's grandmother. Salomea - known as Salla -
had two daughters, one of whom survived the war and one of whom
did not. The elder of these daughters was Edith Zierer. In
January 1945, at age 13, she emerged from a Nazi labor camp in
Czestochowa, Poland, a waif on the verge of death. Separated
from her family, unaware that her mother had been killed by the
Germans, she could scarcely walk. But walk she did, to a train
station, where she climbed onto a coal wagon. The train moved
slowly, the win