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."
Right up until a few days before his death Saturday at 84, the pope kept in touch with school friends from his hometown of Wadowice. Their grief for him now is compounded by sadness at their thinning ranks 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.
Wojtyla was one of 40 members of the Wadowice school class of 1938. A tearful Eugeniusz Mroz said he knows of only six survivors. "There are fewer and fewer of us."
Mroz recalled the future pope as a good student and serious boy who wouldn't tattle on his less disciplined mates. He recalled how they once got out of a Greek class by wrapping a student in a blanket and insisting he needed to see a doctor.
Lolek "went along with it," Mroz said.
At their first reunion, in 1948, class members recounted how they had spent the preceding 10 years. Already "some of us were missing," said Mroz, who survived forced labor in occupied Poland during World War II. "Ten of us were lost in the war."
When Wojtyla was bishop of nearby Krakow, they gathered for dinner once a year before Christmas. "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 in response to the Christmas greetings he sent in December. Puklo last heard from him 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 theater with young Wojtyla during the Nazi occupation. "He joked in the letter and kidded me, as he always did."
While the pope's old friends were willing to talk about the letters, they refused to reveal the contents.
Jerzy Kluger was 5 when he met Wojtyla, who was 6 at the time.
"He was always the best student in the class," Kluger remembered. "Every time after he left my house, my grandmother would always say: 'Jurek, why can't you be just a bit like he is?'"
"Even when he was a young boy, he would already show great concern for social equality, especially for the Jews," Kluger, who is Jewish, said by telephone from Rome. "This was very important to him from a very early age."
The two kept in touch, with Kluger visiting the Vatican so they could have dinner together.
"It is amazing but after becoming pope and having all the responsibilities and duties on his head, his attitude toward his old friends never changed," said another classmate, Stanislaw Jura of Krakow. "He treated us in the same way as if were again sitting on those school benches. Our friendship was always very important to him."
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