Alina Borkowski with Pope John Paul II
Rudi Polt was polite but persistent in his request to have a written record of the death of his friend and fellow Oahu resident and Catholic Alina Borkowski. Because she deserved it, he said. Here it is.
Borkowski was a Polish actress who called herself a friend of St. John Paul II, primarily because she produced and acted in a play he wrote in 1960 when he was bishop of Krakow called “The Jeweler’s Shop.”
The pope himself was an actor in his youth. His play was a philosophical look at married love through the lives of three couples, difficult to understand, Borkowski said, but a “thought-provoking love story.”
In 1985, she produced the play in Honolulu where she was a part-time resident with her husband. It was the first dramatic presentation for St. Francis Hospital’s new L.Q. Pang Educational Center.
Borkowski had translated the play and staged it earlier in Washington state. A year before the Hawaii production, she had met the pope in the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square where she gave him an English version of the play and invited him to the opening. She said that he told her he would “love to come,” but that Honolulu was “too far away.”
Borkowski moved to Honolulu permanently in 1992 after her husband died and in 2006 wrote the book “The Actress and the Pope.”
The actress was born on Aug. 20, 1944, in St. John Paul’s birthplace of Krakow. She died in Kaneohe on Oct. 28, 2021, at the age of 77.
She said that the main lesson of the play was that “human life is short and that only one love — God’s love — lasts forever.”
