SAINT MAXIMILIEN KOLBE : LE PRISONNIER 16770
The deathcamp
Auschwitz became the
killing centre during WWII where the largest numbers of European
Jews were murdered by the Nazis. One Christian man who died here became a martyr to the
truth of evils of Nazism - a true hero for our time, a saint who
lived what he preached, total love toward God and man ...
Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who died as
prisoner 16770 in Auschwitz,
on August 14, 1941. When a prisoner escaped from
the camp, the Nazis selected 10 others to be killed by starvation
in reprisal for the escape. One of the 10 selected to die,
Franciszek Gajowniczek, began to cry: My
wife! My children! I will never see them again!
At this Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his
place. His request was granted ...
The story begins
on 8 January, 1894 - Raymond Kolbe was born the second son of a poor
weaver at Zdunska Wola near Lodz in Poland. In his infancy Raymond seems to have been normally mischievous
but one day, after his mother had scolded him for some mischief
or other, her words took effect and brought about a radical change in the
child's behaviour. Later Raymond explained this change:'That night I asked the
Mother of God what was to become of me. Then she came to me holding two crowns,
one white, the other red. She asked if I was willing to accept either of these
crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that
I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.'
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Thus early did
the child believe and accept that he was destined for martyrdom. His belief in
his dream coloured all his future actions.
In 1910 he became a Franciscan, taking the
name Maximilian. He studied at Rome and was ordained in 1919. He
returned to Poland and taught Church history in a seminary. He
built a friary just west of Warsaw, which eventually housed 762
Franciscans and printed eleven periodicals, one with a
circulation of over a million, including a daily newspaper.
In 1930 he went to Asia, where he founded friaries in Nagasaki
and in India. In 1936 he was recalled to supervise the original
friary near Warsaw. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he knew
that the friary would be seized, and sent most of the friars
home. He was imprisoned briefly and then released, and returned
to the friary, where he and the other friars began to organize a
shelter for 3,000 Polish refugees, among whom were 2,000 Jews.
The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They
housed, fed and clothed them, and brought all their machinery
into use in their service.
The young Maximilian Kolbe
Inevitably, the community came under suspicion and was watched
closely. Then in May 1941 the friary was closed down and
Maximilian and four companions were taken to the deathcamp Auschwitz, where
they worked with the other prisoners.
On June 15, 1941, he
managed to write a letter to his mother:
'Dear Mama, At the end of the
month of May I was transferred to the camp of Auschwitz. Everything is well in
my regard. Be tranquil about me and about my health, because the good God is
everywhere and provides for everything with love. It would be well
that you do not write to me until you will have received other news from me,
because I do not know how long I will stay here. Cordial greetings and
kisses, affectionately. Raymond.'
One day
an SS officer found some of the heaviest planks he could lay hold of and
personally loaded them on the Franciscan's back, ordering him to run. When he
collapsed, the SS officer kicked him in the stomach and face and had his men give him
fifty lashes. When the priest lost consciousness the Nazis threw him in the mud and
left him for dead. But his companions managed to smuggle him to the camp
infirmary - and he recovered. The doctor, Rudolph Diem, later recalled:'I can
say with certainty that during my four years in Auschwitz, I never saw such a
sublime example of the love of God and one's neighbor.'
Prisoners at Auschwitz were slowly and systematically starved,
and their pitiful rations were barely enough to sustain a child: one cup of
imitation coffee in the morning, and weak soup and half a loaf of bread after
work. When food was brought, everyone struggled to get his place
and be sure of a portion. Father Maximilian Kolbe however, stood aside
in spite of the ravages of starvation, and frequently there would
be none left for him. At other times he shared his meager ration
of soup or bread with others.
In
the harshness of the slaughterhouse Father Kolbe maintained the gentleness of
Christ. At
night he seldom would lie down to rest. He moved from bunk to bunk,
saying: 'I am a Catholic priest. Can I do anything for you?'
A prisoner
later recalled how he and several others often crawled
across the floor at night to be near the bed of Father Kolbe, to
make their confessions and ask for consolation. Father Kolbe
pleaded with his fellow prisoners to forgive their persecutors
and to overcome evil with good. When he was beaten by the guards, he never cried
out. Instead, he prayed for his tormentors.
Maximilian Kolbe the Saint
A Protestant
doctor who treated the patients in Block 12 later recalled how Father Kolbe waited until all the others had been
treated before asking for help. He constantly sacrificed himself
for the others.
In order to discourage escapes,
Auschwitz had a rule that if a
man escaped, ten men would be killed in retaliation. In July 1941
a man from Kolbe's bunker escaped. The dreadful irony of the
story is that the escaped prisoner was later found drowned in a
camp latrine, so the terrible reprisals had been exercised
without cause. But the remaining men of the bunker were led out.
'The fugitive has not been
found!' the commandant
Karl Fritsch screamed. 'You will all pay for this. Ten of you will be locked
in the
starvation bunker without food or water until they die.' The prisoners trembled in terror. A few
days in this bunker without food and water, and a man's
intestines dried up and his brain turned to fire.
The ten were selected, including Franciszek Gajowniczek,
imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He couldn't help a
cry of anguish. 'My poor wife!' he sobbed. 'My
poor children! What will they do?' When he uttered this cry of dismay, Maximilian stepped
silently forward, took off his cap, and stood before the
commandant and said, 'I am a Catholic priest. Let me take
his place. I am old. He has a wife and children.'
Astounded, the
icy-faced Nazi commandant
asked, 'What does this
Polish pig want?'
Father kolbe pointed with his hand to the condemned Franciszek
Gajowniczek and repeated 'I am a Catholic priest from
Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.'
Observers believed in horror that the commandant would be
angered and would refuse the request, or would order the death of
both men. The commandant remained silent for a moment. What his
thoughts were on being confronted by this brave priest we have no
idea. Amazingly, however, he acceded to the request. Apparantly
the Nazis had more use for a young worker than for an old
one, and was happy to make the exchange. Franciszek Gajowniczek
was returned to the ranks, and the priest took his place.
Gajowniczek
later recalled:
'I
could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was
going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else
willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some
dream?
I
was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian
Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this.
The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time
that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.
For a
long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be
saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that
a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps
he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them
keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.'‘
Franciszek
Gajowniczek
Father
Kolbe was thrown down the stairs of Building 13 along with the
other victims and simply left there to starve. Hunger and thirst soon gnawed at
the men. Some drank their own urine, others licked moisture on the dank walls. Maximilian Kolbe encouraged the
others with prayers, psalms, and meditations on the Passion of
Christ. After two weeks, only four were alive. The cell was
needed for more victims, and the camp executioner, a common
criminal called Bock, came in and injected a lethal dose of
cabolic acid into the left arm of each of the four dying men.
Kolbe was the only one still fully conscious and with a prayer on
his lips, the last prisoner raised his arm for the
executioner. His wait was over ...
A personal testimony
about the way Maximilian Kolbe met death is given by Bruno
Borgowiec, one of the few Poles who were assigned to render service to the
starvation bunker. He told it to his parish priest before he died in 1947:
'The ten condemned to death went through terrible days. From the
underground cell in which they were shut up there continually arose the echo of
prayers and canticles. The man in-charge of emptying the buckets of urine found them always empty.
Thirst drove the prisoners to drink the contents. Since they had grown
very weak, prayers were now only whispered. At every inspection, when almost all
the others were now lying on the floor, Father Kolbe was seen kneeling or standing
in the centre as he looked cheerfully in the face of the SS men.
Father Kolbe never asked for
anything and did not complain, rather he encouraged the others, saying that the
fugitive might be found and then they would all be freed. One of the SS guards remarked:
this
priest is really a great man. We have never seen anyone like him ..
Two weeks
passed in this way. Meanwhile one after another they died, until only Father Kolbe
was left. This the authorities felt was too long. The cell was needed for new
victims. So one day they brought in the head of the sick-quarters, a German named Bock, who gave
Father Kolbe an injection of carbolic acid in
the vein of his left arm. Father Kolbe, with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his
arm to the executioner. Unable to watch this I left under the pretext of work to
be done. Immediately after the SS men had left I
returned to the cell, where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position
against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His
face was calm and radiant ..'
So it was that Father Maximilian Kolbe was executed on 14
August, 1941 at the age of forty-seven years, a martyr of
charity. The death certificate, as always made
out with German precision, indicated the hour of death 12.30.
Father
Kolbe's body was removed to the crematorium, and without
dignity or ceremony was disposed of, like hundreds of thousands
who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would
follow.
The heroism of Father Kolbe went echoing through Auschwitz. In that desert of
hatred he had sown love. A survivor Jozef Stemler later recalled: 'In the midst of
a brutalization of thought, feeling and words such as had never before been
known, man indeed became a ravening wolf in his relations with other men. And
into this state of affairs came the heroic self-sacrifice of Father Kolbe.'
Another survivor Jerzy Bielecki declared that Father Kolbe's death was 'a shock filled with
hope, bringing new life and strength ... It was like a powerful shaft of light
in the darkness of the camp.'
The cell where
Father Kolbe died is now a shrine. Maximilian Kolbe was
beatified as Confessor by Paul VI in 1970, and canonized as
Martyr by Pope John Paul II in 1981.
Franciszek Gajowniczek
But
what happened to Gajowniczek - the man Father Kolbe saved?
He died on March 13, 1995, at Brzeg in Poland, 95 years old -
and 53 years after Kolbe had saved him. But he was never to
forget the ragged monk. After his release from Auschwitz,
Gajowniczek made his way back to his hometown, with the dream of seeing his
family again. He found his wife but his two sons had been killed during the war.
Every
year on August 14 he went back to Auschwitz. He spent the next five decades paying homage to Father
Kolbe, honoring the man who died on his behalf.
Father
Kolbe's incredible deed is an inspiration for all mankind. His life serves as eulogy to the millions who
perished in World War II. He did not leave his legacy as an ode to
the past - rather as a beacon of hope to the future ...
Sources:
Bruno
Chenu: The Book of Christian Martyrs, London: SCM Press, 1988
John
P. Whalen: New Catholic Encyclopedia, Maxmilian Kolbe, New York
Mary
Craig: Blessed Maximilian Kolbe, Priest hero of a death camp
Manas
Ranjan James: The Martyrdom of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe
Elaine
Murray Stone: Maximilian Kolbe, Paulist Press
www.auschwitz.dk
Louis Bülow Privacy.
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