Last week Polish and German leaders commemorated the 60th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland that started World War II, but the war keeps springing new surprises on the survivors. Waszkinel is one of many hidden children in Poland who have learned their true identities only as adults. Waszkinel began pressing his mother about his mysterious past in 1978, when she returned from a hospital stay. There had been too many unexplained events: the time, when he was 5, that some drunks called him “Jew! Jew!”; the conflicting records of his date of birth; the moments when the dark-complexioned boy tried to find similarities with his Slavic-looking parents; his devoutly Catholic father’s opposition when he announced he wanted to study for the priesthood. His mother cried as she admitted the truth. “I was 35 and had been a priest for 12 years,” Waszkinel recalls. “But my life started over.”
And restarted in the dark. Waszkinel’s mother couldn’t even tell him the name of his biological parents. “They loved you very much,” she told the priest. Until he learned who he really was, Waszkinel decided, he would tell no one. The single exception: he wrote to the new Polish pope, explaining that his discovery about his Jewish origins made him feel a special bond to the successor of Peter, a Jewish apostle. John Paul II’s warm reply started with the words “Beloved Brother.”
Waszkinel learned two more facts from his mother’s tale: he had an older brother called Samuel, and his biological father had been a tailor in Swieciany. For more than a decade, those leads produced nothing. But in 1992 a nun who had saved Jewish children during the war went to Israel and located survivors from Swieciany who identified Waszkinel’s parents and even found his father’s brother. A tearful reunion in Israel followed. And Waszkinel obtained a small photo of his Jewish mother. “All my life I had been looking for a resemblance, and this woman looks just like me,” he says.
The priest wrote again to the pope, saying he would like to change his name to Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, adding his Jewish father’s name. The pope’s reply came in an envelope addressed with his expanded name. The priest then went public.
As a Catholic and a Jew, Waszkinel honors both sets of parents. He regularly visits both his Catholic mother’s grave in Lublin and the Majdanek concentration camp on the city’s outskirts, where his Jewish mother and brother may have perished. Under his Roman collar he wears a silver medal: a cross enclosed by the Star of David. “The cross shouldn’t be separated from the star,” he says. In his case, it never is.
