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From The Times
April 4, 2005

Touch of humanity after the Holocaust

By Stephen Farrell
A JEWISH Holocaust survivor recalled yesterday being fed and comforted by the young Karol Wojtyla as she sat starving and alone after being released from a Nazi labour camp.

Idit Tzirer was 13 when she fled Czestochowa camp in Poland after Russian soldiers liberated the country in January 1945. Emaciated, suffering from tuberculosis and ignored by the crowds milling around her in a small Polish town near Cracow, she sat for two days without food or water as she headed home, unaware that her family had already been killed.

Alone and shivering, she was approached by the then 24-year-old seminary student Wojtyla, two years before his ordination. “Suddenly, there he was,” she said. “He brought me some tea and two pieces of bread with cheese.”

He sat with her and put his cloak around her because she was freezing. Then she told her benefactor she could not walk on her swollen feet to Cracow.

“He lifted me on his back and carried me with the slice of bread in my hand that I hadn’t finished eating yet and he carried me four kilometres on his back in the snow,” she said.

After moving to Israel, she corresponded regularly with him when he became Pope. “I received a letter from him last year and I knew it was the last,” she said. “His handwriting was very shaky.”

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