Ora pro nobis.
Maximilian Kolbe (8 January 1894 -
14 August 1941) was a Franciscan friar imprisoned by the National Socialist Gestapo at Auschwitz in 1941 because of his work as a Catholic publisher. He founded and and supervised the monastery of Niepokalanów near Warsaw, operating an amateur-radio station (SP3RN), and founding or running several other organizations and publications.
Because he was a priest, he was treated with particular savagery by the prison guards and given the dirtiest, heaviest work. He ministered to his fellow prisoners, encouraging them to forgive their persecutors and to overcome evil with good. He constantly sacrificed himself for others to the point where a doctor later testified, "In Auschwitz, I knew of no other similar case of such heroic love of neighbor."
After the outbreak of World War II, which started with the invasion of Poland by the National Socialist regime of Germany, Kolbe was one of the few brothers who chose to remain in the monastery, where he organized a temporary hospital. After the town was captured by the National Socialists, he was briefly arrested by them on 19 September 1939 but released on 8 December. He refused to sign the Deutsche Volksliste, which would have given him rights similar to those of German citizens in exchange for recognizing his German ancestry. Upon his release he continued work at his friary, where he and other friars provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from German persecution in their friary in Niepokalanów. Kolbe also received permission to continue publishing religious works, though significantly reduced in scope. The monastery thus continued to act as a publishing house, issuing a number of anti-National Socialist publications.
On 17 February 1941, the monastery was shut down by the National Socialist authorities. That day Kolbe and four others were arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. On 28 May, he was transferred to Auschwitz as prisoner 16670.
Continuing to act as a priest, Kolbe was subjected to violent harassment, including beatings and lashings. Once, he was smuggled to a prison hospital by friendly inmates. Several months after his imprisonment, a prisoner escaped, and the guards gathered ten innocent prisoners to die in reprisal. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, "My wife! My children!", Kolbe volunteered to take his place, and the guards accepted his offer. With the nine other condemned men he was stripped of all his clothing and placed in a starvation bunker. According to an eyewitness, who was an assistant janitor at that time, in his prison cell Kolbe led the prisoners in prayer. Each time the guards checked on him, he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. At the end of two weeks, he was one of four men still alive. Because they needed the bunker for more victims, these men were injected with a lethal dose of carbolic acid. Kolbe is said to have raised his left arm and calmly waited for the deadly injection. Their bodies were cremated the following day, August 15, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
In this icon, Maximilian wears the black Franciscan habit of the Conventual branch of the Order of Friars Minor. Over his arm he carries the jacket of his uniform in Auschwitz. The number on the jacket was the one assigned to him when he arrived, and the red triangle identifies him as a political prisoner. Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man whose place he took, survived the concentration camp and eventually returned to his family.
“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”
Almighty God, by whose grace and power your holy martyr Maximillian triumphed over suffering and was faithful even to death: Grant us, who now remember him in thanksgiving, to be so faithful in our witness to you in this world, that we may receive with him the crown of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
