Like a good actor, no matter what the unexpected disruption, he absolutely refused to break character.
The audience arrived for the performance at staggered times so as to avoid detection by the armed Nazi patrols. Inside the apartment, the door was locked, the blinds drawn, the lights lowered. Furniture was pushed aside to make room for the “stage” where a group of young actors, calling themselves The Rhapsodic Theater, put on an adaptation of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem, Pan Tadeusz. Yet right in the middle of the performance, on the street below the apartment, a trucks rolled by blaring Nazi propaganda. As every single person in the room had put his or her life on the line to attend this performance, it would have been understandable if the performers had halted and everyone stayed quiet until the danger passed. But that didn’t happen. The actors didn’t break character—and in particular, the one who was speaking lines as the propaganda passed by. As George Weigel describes the scene at the very beginning of his magisterial biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope:
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