Jerzy Kluger, 1921–2011

In 1989, Pope John Paul II asked his trusted friend Jerzy Kluger to return to their hometown of Wadowice in southern Poland, where they had first met as 5-year-olds, to help dedicate a plaque where the town’s synagogue had stood before World War II. Kluger was initially hesitant; he had not visited the country in the five decades since most of his family was killed in Nazi death camps. He eventually assented, though the trip “was not easy for him,” the pope later wrote. It was one of the many tasks Kluger carried out for his longtime friend, culminating in the pontiff’s trailblazing efforts to heal Catholic-Jewish relations.

Growing up as the son of a successful lawyer, Kluger knew the future pontiff by his boyhood nickname, Lolek, said The Washington Post. The young friends played soccer in the streets, helped each other with homework, and were constant presences in each other’s homes. They lost touch during World War II, when Kluger and his father were jailed in a Soviet prison camp. It wasn’t until 1965 that their friendship was rekindled, said The New York Times. Kluger, then living in Rome with his wife, chanced upon his friend’s name in a news report about the Second Vatican Council. He left a phone message, never expecting a reply. “Lolek called right back.”

The two remained close for the next four decades, corresponding regularly and often enjoying long conversations over dinner, said the London Telegraph. When John Paul became pope, in 1978, he granted his first private audience to Kluger and his family. At the pope’s request, Kluger played a key behind-the-scenes role in the 1993 establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel. The pope’s other efforts to improve Catholic-Jewish relations—he was the first pontiff to visit a synagogue, the first to visit Auschwitz, and the first to condemn anti-Semitism as a sin—sprang largely from the men’s long friendship, which Kluger said had transformed his life. “I became somebody,” he said. “I was nobody before.”