WADOWICE, Poland (AP):
THE WORLD came to know Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II, but Danuta Puklo remembers him as Lolek, the nickname for the generous boy who helped her pass a big test in high school.
"We were going to take the graduation exam together, but I got cold feet and backed out," recalled Puklo, 84.
"I met Karol on the street after his exam ... I said to him 'Lolek, please help me.' He stayed up with me all night and helped me with the material."
RANKS GETTING THINNER
Right up until a few days before his death Friday at 84, the pope kept in touch by letter with school friends from their home town of Wadowice. Their grief for him now is compounded by sadness at the thinning ranks of their group, all in their 80s - and the loss of the one person who served as the focus of their reunions over the years.
"This is one of the saddest days of my life," Puklo said.
"There are fewer and fewer of us now," said a tearful Eugeniusz Mroz, who knew of six survivors from the 40 members of the Wadowice school's class of 1938, thinned first by World War II and now by old age.
Mroz recalled the future pope as a good student and serious boy, who still wouldn't tattle on his less disciplined mates. He recalled the time they all skipped a particularly boring Greek class by wrapping one student in a blanket and insisting he needed to be taken to the doctor.
"He went along with it," said Mroz.
At their first reunion, in 1948, the group took walks together and each one stood at dinner to recount how they had spent the preceding 10 years. Already, "some of us were missing," said Mroz, who survived forced labour for the Nazi occupiers during World War II. "Ten of us were lost in the war."
When Wojtyla was bishop of nearby Krakow, they gathered for a dinner once a year before Christmas. "Lolek invited us to Krakow, and we used to meet once a year before Christmas for dinner, then we sang songs, hiking songs, and carols.
Lolek especially loves carols," he said.
They were looking forward to the December 1978 meeting, but in October, their Lolek - then archbishop of Krakow - was elected pope. From then on, they kept in touch mostly by letter; the last meeting was in 2002 during the pope's last visit to Poland.
The last time Mroz heard from Lolek was when he sent Christmas greetings in December, and got an answer back. Puklo heard from him last just after Easter, on Tuesday, March 29, four days before he died.
"On Good Friday I sent him Easter greetings, which Father Dziwisz was to read to him," Puklo said, referring to the pope's private secretary Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz.
"On the following Tuesday I received a response. On one side there were wishes written in Latin by the pope, and on the other Father Dziwisz wrote his wishes."
Danuta Michalowska, 82, took solace in a personal letter the pope sent her just last week.
"It was just as if he had written it 20 years ago," said Michalowska, who acted in an underground Krakow theatre with young Wojtyla during the Nazi occupation of Poland in the early 1940s. "He joked in the letter and kidded me, as he always did."
