John Paul Home to Honor Holocaust Victims

Houston Chronicle ^ | April 1, 2006 | VANESSA GERA

[lizol]

John Paul Home to Honor Holocaust Victims

By VANESSA GERA Associated Press Writer © 2006 The Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland — The home where Pope John Paul II was born and raised will soon include a memorial to Jewish Holocaust victims, the site's previous owner said Saturday.

Ron Balamuth, an American who inherited the property from his Jewish grandparents, who were killed in a Nazi death camp, sold the home Wednesday to a Polish businessman.

Balamuth sold the 19th-century house in Wadowice to the foundation of Ryszard Krauze on the condition that it establish a memorial to Jews killed by the Nazis and that it continue housing a museum about John Paul that's been there since 1984. The foundation immediately handed over control of the house to the Polish Catholic Church.

The sale, for an undisclosed sum, comes as Poles mark the first anniversary of their beloved pontiff's death on Sunday with Masses and other ceremonies across the country.

Balamuth said the planned transformation was fitting for a site honoring a pope who "embodied the friendship between Jews and Catholics."

Many of those "who visit the house don't know of the pope's friendship with Jews, or that the house was owned by a Jewish family that died in the Holocaust," Balamuth told The Associated Press.

"I didn't see a future for me occupying the house," Balamuth, a psychoanalyst who works in New York, said by telephone. "But I had a vision of this being a symbol of Jewish and Catholic dialogue and friendship."

The memorial will be established on the ground floor of the two-story house where Balamuth's grandfather Yechiel Balamuth ran a general store. The family rented out two rooms on the top floor to the parents of the future pope, who was born Karol Wojtyla, on May 18, 1920.

After the Nazi invasion, Balamuth's grandparents were sent to the death camp of Belzec, where they perished. His father, Chaim Balamuth, survived by fleeing with his wife to Russia on a motorcycle for sale in the family store.

Balamuth said he was seeking memorabilia and keepsakes from other Jewish survivors from Wadowice that could be included at the memorial, which historians and other experts will develop. All that he owns from before the war are three family photographs.

Balamuth recalled that during a private audience with the pope in 2000, he brought along a photograph of the old storefront.

"The pope recognized it and said, 'This is where I got my first tricycle,'" Balamuth said.