It struck again in 1929 when his mother died of heart and kidney problems, just a month before Lolek's 9th birthday. And when he was 12, Lolek's 26-year-old brother Edmund, a physician in the town of Bielsko, died of scarlet fever.
Lolek, himself, had two near-misses with mortality in his youth. He was hit once by a streetcar and again by a truck in 1944 while a college student. The injuries left the otherwise robust pope -- 5-foot-10 1/2 inches, 175 pounds in his prime -- with a slight stoop to his shoulders that is particularly noticeable when he is tired.

"The pope's youth wasn't happy," Father Joseph Vandrisse, a former French missionary and now a journalist, told TIME magazine. "He has meditated a lot on the meaning of suffering..."

Even as an adult he has been beset by physical difficulties, including a dislocated shoulder, a broken thigh that led to femur-replacement surgery, the removal of a precancerous tumor from his colon and an attempt on his life by a gunman whose two bullets wounded the pope in the abdomen, right arm and left hand.

Lolek and his father lived in a Spartan, one-room apartment behind the church, and the father devoted himself to raising his son. He sewed Lolek's clothes and had the boy study in a chilly room to toughen him and develop his concentration.

"He tried to develop the same discipline in his son that he instilled in his soldiers," one of Lolek's childhood friends told People magazine.

But the father didn't forget about play. A friend remembers entering the Wojtylas' apartment and finding father and son playing soccer with a ball made of rags.