With filial devotion I kiss the doorsill of my family home, expressing my gratitude to God's Providence for the gift of life given to me by my Parents, for the warmth of the family nest, for the love of my loved ones, which gave me a sense of security and power, even when it came to experience the death of a family member and the hardships of everyday life in difficult times.
John Paul II
At the beginning of the 20th century, the tenement house next to the church belonged to the famous Jewish family of Róża and Yechiel Bałamuth. Yechiel ran a department store on the ground floor of the building from the market side and lived with his family on the first floor above the store. In the office at the back of the building, at 7 Kościelna Street, there were small craftsmen's workshops and apartments for rent. In 1919, Emilia and Karol Wojtyła rented one of them, the one on the first floor, and lived there with their then thirteen-year-old son Edmund. The second child of the Wojtyła family, daughter Olga Maria, died as a newborn in 1916.
A year later, on 18 May 1920, just after 5 p.m., Karol Józef Wojtyła was born in the bedroom of the Wojtyła family, to later become the Pope and St. John Paul II.
The Wojtyła family flat was accessed from Kościelna Street, through a small courtyard, and then steep stairs to the gallery on the first floor and through the kitchen. The flat was small, because it consisted of a kitchen, bedroom and living room designed in an enfilade. They were arranged modestly. When Edmund went to Cracow to study medicine after graduating from high school in 1924, only the parents and their youngest son Karol lived there. Edmund spent his holiday breaks at home, at the same time doing medical internships in the general hospital in Wadowice.
After a long illness, the mother, Emilia, died in her flat in April 1929, and three years later, in 1932, her elder son, MD Edmund Wojtyła, died in a hospital in Bielsko (today Bielsko-Biała). Since then, only Karol and his father had stayed in their flat for the next 7 years. The father was responsible for running the household and raising his son. He taught him the German language, read books with him and suggested books he should read. He was a faithful supporter of his son during sports competitions and went on school trips as a guardian and wandered with him along the trails of the Beskid Mały Mountains. In the summer of 1938, both Wojtyłas left to Cracow, where they lived in a tenement house at 10 Tyniecka Street. In the autumn, Karol began his studies in Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University.
Other families lived in the flat at 7 Kościelna Street until 1984, when the first museum dedicated to the Pope's family house was opened here. Originally, it was located only in the Wojtyła’s flat. Since the modernisation of the building carried out between 2010 and 2014, the flat has become the heart of the “Holy Father John Paul II Family Home Museum”. A modern multimedia exhibition, covering the entire building today, presents the life of John Paul II from the first days in Wadowice to his last hours in Rome.
