BBC Docudrama: Young John Paul II - Witness to Evil

Drama-documentary telling the story of five years which transformed the life of Karol Wojtyla and set him on the path to the Vatican.

The man who would become John Paul II was 19 when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. He had no intention of joining the church, but the devastating experience of Nazi occupation led him first to join the underground resistance and then to risk his life studying in secret to become a priest.

Interviews with key survivors from the period who knew him well, and the Pope's own writings, are combined in a powerful exploration of the young John Paul II's coming of age, including his brushes with death and the horrors he witnessed that helped to shape his thinking.

led him first to join the underground resistance

There were reports that Karol Wojtyla was a member of the Polish resistance in World War II. Mieczyslaw Malinski, a friend who became a priest, scoffed at the accounts. He said that members of the underground had asked them both to join the fight against the Nazis, but that the two had declined. But Joseph L. Lichten, of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in Rome, said that a Karol Wojtyla was active in a clandestine group that worked with the Christian Democratic movement Unia, which had a record of helping Jews, and that he had been put on a blacklist by the Germans.