04 April, 2006
Part of former Pope John Paul II’s childhood home in Poland is to be converted into a Holocaust memorial. Ron Balamuth, who inherited the property from his grandparents who were killed in a Nazi death camp, sold the house in Wadowice (a town only ten miles away the site of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz) on the condition that part of it be used for a memorial to the Jews killed during World War II. The parents of the Karol Wojtyla, as John Paul II. was then known, rented two rooms of the house’s top floor from Balamuth’s grandparents.
