JERUSALEM, FEB 6, 1998 (ZENIT) - "I remember perfectly. There I was, a 13-year-old girl, alone, sick and weak. I had spent three years in a German concentration camp at the point of death. And Karol Wojtyla saved my life, like an angel, a dream come from heaven: he gave me food and drink and then carried me on his shoulders some four kilometers through the snow before reaching the train to safety."

Edith Zirer explains the events as though they happened yesterday, but they all took place on a cold morning at the beginning of February 1945. The young Jew, who still didn't realize that she was the only member of her family to survive the Nazi massacre, was carried in the arms of a tall, strong, 25-year-old priest, who asked nothing of her, simply giving her a ray of hope.

She says that that priest is today the Bishop of Rome and wants to personally thank him, after all these years. "Just a small thanks in Polish for what he did, for how he did it, to tell him that I never forgot him," she said from her home in Carmelo, near Haifa.

Edith is 66 years old and has two children. She built a new life for herself in Israel, where she arrived in 1951, still suffering the physical scars of tuberculosis and the horrific images of the war in her dreams.

Although she kept the story a secret all these years, when Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope in 1978, she began to feel that it was necessary to speak, to tell someone, to show her thanks. The journalists of "Kolbo," the daily newspaper of Haifa, put the obvious questions to her: "How can you be sure that that priest was the Pope? Why did you wait so long?" The editors report in their article, published February 6, "The story is convincing. This is not a bid for publicity. All the details she gives seem credible." Her story was so convincing that the Israeli ambassador to the Holy See is already working to arrange a meeting between Mrs. Zirer and the Pope's secretary.

Mrs. Zirer's story speaks for itself: "On January 28, 1945, Russian soldiers set free the prisoners of the concentration camp in Hassak, where I had been imprisoned for almost three years, working in a munitions factory. I was confused and sick in bed. Two days later, I arrived at a small train station between Czestochowa and Krakow. [Karol Wojtyla had just been ordained priest in Krakow.] I was convinced that I was at the end of my journey. I fell on the ground in a corner of the large hall where dozens of refugees were gathering, most of whom were still wearing their numbered uniforms from the concentration camps. Then Wojtyla saw me. He came with a big cup of tea, the first hot beverage I had drunk in weeks. Afterwards, he brought me a little bit of cheese with black Polish bread -- divine! But I didn't want to eat; I was too tired. He made me eat. Then, he took me in his arms and carried me a long way. All the while, the snow was falling. I remember his brown jacket, his tranquil voice as he told me of the death of his parents and his brother, of the loneliness he was experiencing, of the need to accept suffering and to fight to live. His name is written indelibly in my memory."

When they finally reached the convoy that would take the refugees West, Edith met a Jewish family that warned her, "Be careful: the priests try to convert Hebrew children." She became afraid and escaped. "Only afterwards did I understand that he only wanted to help me," she added. "And I would like to tell him that personally."