There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:13)
Maximilian Kolbe was a polish priest who, at a very young age, made a vow to honor and serve the Blessed Virgin Mary for as long as he lived. His life emulated this commitment to extraordinary lengths. Father of Love
Maximilian Kolbe, the Man
He was born on January 8, 1894 in Zdunska Wola, Poland to devout Catholics Maria and Julius Kolbe and given the baptismal name of Raymond. Both his mother and father were hard-working weavers who could barely keep enough food on the table. They had four sons. Tragically, one son died at just one years old and another at four.
Raymond, their second son, was a mischievous boy. His mother worried about his future. One day after his mother gave him a particularly bad scolding; her words left a permanent mark. That night Raymond asked the Mother of God what would become of him. She appeared to him holding two crowns, a white and a red one. The white crown symbolized purity, the red martyrdom. She asked if he was willing to accept either of these crowns. He asked for both and she left. He believed his destiny was set.
In 1910, Raymond became a member of the Franciscan Friars, a community of Catholic priests and brothers dedicated to God. He took the religious name of “Maximilian Maria”. Two years later, he left to study in Rome earning doctorates in both philosophy and theology. He also had a great interest in astrophysics and even designed an airplane-like spacecraft, similar to the eventual space shuttle. He even attempted to patent the idea. The scientific community, however, was not ready for his designs.
Maximilian Kolbe’s love of the church and dedication to honor and serve the Virgin Mary led him to be ordained a priest in 1918 at age 24. He practiced holiness everyday and pursued all he did with great dedication. He was a man known for his gentle, thoughtful and cheerful ways.
Starting a City
When Maximilian was thirty-three, in the year 1927, near Warsaw Poland, he created the “City of the Immaculate” or “Niepokalanow.” By 1937, his City became the world’s largest monastery housing over 700 Franciscan Friars.
The City was a hub of charitable works through radio and the distribution of printed materials. The friar’s talents were put to good use. Some held jobs as printers or writers as well as carpenters, electricians, plumbers, doctors, dentists, gardeners, and cooks. They produced several catholic publications, even one for children, and one magazine, The Knight of the Immaculate, took a stand against religious apathy and, at its peak, had a press run of 750,000 copies a month. The Polish bishops also published a daily newspaper for their Catholic congregations, which they called, The Little Journal. Not only was the City a publishing wonder, but the friars managed to spend three hours a day in prayer and attending masses.
Expanding Worldwide
Although Father Kolbe’s City was thriving, it was not enough for him. He wanted to spread the good word of Mary Immaculate worldwide. But how would he do this? The answer came to him when he met a group of Japanese students on a train ride from Warsaw to Cracow. He talked to the students in Italian, a language they both shared, and when the train stopped at Cracow, they exchanged little keepsakes. Whenever Father Kolbe looked at the keepsakes, he thought about how beneficial it would be for the students to know and learn about Jesus. So, he decided to pursue this lofty mission of creating another Mary Immaculate community in Japan. He wasn’t sure how he would do it because, not only did he not know the language, but he took a vow of poverty so he had no financial means either. In spite of these seemingly impossible obstacles, he put all his trust in the Virgin Mary to help him accomplish his goal.
In 1931, with much perseverance and faith, he succeeded in starting a village called the “Garden of Mary” in the hills of Nagasaki, Japan. By 1936, while his other City was going strong in Poland, the Garden of Mary had grown to 45 friars. He also found a way to publish The Knight in Japanese with six times the circulation of its Japanese Catholic rival. The priest was unstoppable.
The Nazi’s Gaining Power
For years Father Kolbe enjoyed the growth of his Garden of Mary, but a war was brewing back in Poland. It was 1936 and Adolf Hitler, a pale man with penetrating blue eyes, was the leader of Germany’s national socialist workers’ (Nazi) party. He was a dictator with a lust for power and a hate for the Jews, blaming them for World War I and the poor economic conditions in Germany. His desire for world domination was becoming more and more of a threat to Europe. Father Kolbe had received orders to return from Japan for a Provincial meeting.
Through his radio show, Father Kolbe spoke out against Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and the concentration camps where the Nazi’s starved and tortured their political prisoners. This made him a disliked man among the Nazi’s who monitored his show. As things heated up, Father Kolbe tried to prepare his friars for the Nazi’s by telling them that they could expect the worst in Poland, but to be brave because it is the will of Mary Immaculate.
On September 1, 1939, Germany waged a vicious attack on Poland. World War II had begun. The Polish army was much smaller than the German army who had already occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia. After one month, Poland had to surrender.
Father Kolbe’s community had dwindled in numbers. He had sent the youngest students and friars home for their safety. All publications ceased and only thirty-eight friars remained. In an attempt to control the polish people, the Nazi’s began to arrest the intellectuals and leaders of the country. They targeted the clergy first.
Eighteen days from the invasion of Poland, the Gestapo or secret German police arrived at the gates of Niepokalanow and paraded into Father Kolbe’s office.
“Are you Maximilian Kolbe, editor of The Little Journal?” they demanded. The Father responded with a yes, making no attempt to resist arrest. They took Father Kolbe away, along with the few other priests who remained in the City. They were loaded onto trucks and brought to a prison in Warsaw known for its interrogation and torture. Luckily, they were not kept there, but instead taken, with 600 other prisoners, on a several day train trip with no food or water to Amititz, an incarceration camp across the German border. Ten-thousand other prisoners awaited them.
At Amititz, prisoners were constantly in fear for their lives, always hungry and cold. Father Kolbe prayed with the men and offered them hope in a grim situation. He would even share his small ration of bread with those who he felt needed it more. The Father, in spite of all the cruelty he witnessed, never spoke an unkind word against his German captors. He said to the prisoners: “When suffering is remote, we are willing to do everything. Now that it is here, let us accept it and bear it willingly for the Immaculate.”
In mid November, Father Kolbe and the friars were transferred to another camp, a better one in a former boarding school. Strangely, on December 8th, the "Feast of the Immaculate Conception" day, where Catholics remember Mary being conceived without Original Sin, Father Kolbe and the friars were released to go home. Some priests suggested to the Father that they should escape to America, but Father Kolbe wanted to return to his City. He said to them: "God has another plan for me."
Upon his return to Niepokalanow, he found the City in shambles. A broken statue of Mary lay on the ground. The Nazi’s had vandalized the buildings. Father Kolbe, undiscouraged, was determined to rebuild his beloved City.
With the help of a few friars who had still been living there, the City was slowly repaired. Friars started to return to Niepokalanow and their numbers rapidly reached three-hundred. Then the Germans decided to use the Father’s City as a refugee camp for the Poles and Jews. Now, not only were his friars in need of food, but thousands of refugees too. Father Kolbe was industrious though and setup shops at the monastery where some of the friars could repair farm machinery. Other friars, who were carpenters and masons, could repair ruined homes. With the money that the friars earned from these jobs, he was able to feed 3,000 people a day including 2,000 Jews.
Father Kolbe wanted to start publishing The Knight again and wrote to Warsaw authorities to get official permission. The Gestapo came to investigate his City and recommended it be shut down for fear of the power of Father Kolbe and the potential for him to start an underground movement through his newspaper. So, initially he was denied permission to publish The Knight but when he thought the timing might be right for a second request, he made it and the District Board allowed him to publish one issue. This would be Father Kolbe’s last one. With remarkable fate, the last edition of The Knight was published in 1940 on December 8th, again on the Feast of the Immaculate. In his final column, in defiance of the Nazi regime, he wrote: “No one can alter the truth. What we can do, and should do, is search for truth and then serve it when we have found it.”
The Final Arrest
In 1939, the Gestapo pursued more strongly Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate all the Poles in his desire for occupying land. Priests were a prime target as a means to gain control. According to Hitler, if a polish priest did not keep his people subdued then he would face the consequences. Father Kolbe knew his days of freedom were numbered.
On the morning of February 17, 1941, Father Kolbe got a call that the Gestapo had arrived at the gates of Niepokalanow. While awaiting his arrest, he knelt down in his office and said several Hail Mary’s. He then walked outside and greeted the Gestapo with the words: “Praised be Jesus Christ!” He was arrested and sent to Pawiak Prison, where a guard who hated priests severely beat him. He became weak and got pneumonia. Other friars offered themselves as hostages for exchange of his release. Furious, the guards ordered Father Kolbe to Auschwitz, the most famous and feared concentration camp in southern Poland.
When Father Kolbe arrived at the camp, he was stripped of his priestly robe and given a blue and white striped camp uniform. He became number 16670.
For many years Father Kolbe had suffered from tuberculosis, which resulted in him only having one healthy lung, but he was still forced to do hard labor. The prisoners worked like dogs in the fields outside the camp from early morning until dawn. At the end of each day, they were given meager rations of one cup of imitation coffee and a half a loaf of bread. Each night, at great risk of being caught, Father Kolbe, would go to the prisoner’s bedsides and ask them if they would like to confess their sins. He prayed for them and even for his tormentors.
The concentration camp’s chimneys never stopped smoking, day and night. The smell of death lingered in the air. More crematoriums needed to be built. Father Kolbe, who had become very weak from lack of food, was forced to push a heavy wheelbarrow filled with stone to the location of a new crematorium. Another prisoner saw his struggle and offered to make the trip in his place. The guards noticed them talking, whipped both of them and then ordered Father Kolbe to now carry the other prisoner, along with the stone, in the barrel. Miraculously, the Father was able to push the barrel without complaint to the site. He said this to his fellow prisoner: “Henry, don’t lose heart. Everything we suffer is for the Immaculate Virgin. Even here, we must pray for those who harm us.”
Even when he landed in the infirmary after a particularly cruel beating by a guard, he was questioned by a doctor on whether or not he believed in God. He replied with a resounding yes. The priest truly believed that goodwill would come of his suffering.
His Fate is Sealed
One day in July a prisoner had escaped from the camp. When a prisoner escapes, the cruel commanders ordered ten men to die as a warning, unless the prisoner returns. The prisoners assembled in a line. They stood in the heat with no food or water for hours fearing their possible fate. Father Kolbe was gravely ill and ready to fall. After the commander selected two men to die, he selected Francis Gajowniczek who cried out, “Please I have a wife and two children. I’ll never see them again.” In that moment, Father Kolbe bravely stepped forward to address the commander, an unheard of act punishable by death. He asked the guard if he could take the man’s place explaining that he had no family and was old and sick and that the other younger man could do more work. The stunned commander surprisingly agreed to the request. Father Kolbe’s fate was sealed. He and nine other men were sent to the underground torture cells where they would suffer a horrible death. The terrible irony was that the prisoner who was thought to have escaped actually had drowned in a camp latrine.
The conditions in the cell were unbearable. The guards had taken the men’s clothes so they were naked and in the dark. There was no furniture, only a bucket in the corner for human waste. Thirst drove some of the men to drink their own urine; some licked the moisture off the wall. Day after day the Nazis denied them food and water. In an effort to calm the men and give them hope, Father Kolbe prayed to the Holy Virgin and led them in song. He also encouraged the men to think that the fugitive might be found, and that they would be saved. He never complained or asked for anything.
Then, on the fourth day, the first man died. By the sixth day, Father Kolbe was too weak to sing anymore, but would whisper prayers in the ears of the dying men. After two torturous weeks, only four men remained alive including Father Kolbe. The commanders needed the cell for the next group of condemned men so the camp doctor was asked to give the remaining men an injection of carbolic acid to speedup their deaths. Upon the doctor’s arrival, he saw that Father Kolbe was the only one out of the three men who was conscious. He was seated leaning peacefully against the wall. After the three men who lay on the floor received the injection, they died instantly. When the doctor came to inject Father Kolbe, he smiled at the doctor as if to give his blessing and forgiveness for what he was about to do. Father Kolbe, at age forty-seven, was the last to die.
The Man He Gave His Life For
Germany finally surrendered on May 7, 1945, defeated by the Soviet Union, together with Great Britain and the United States, who had entered the war against Germany in December 1941. The Nazi’s had tortured and killed approximately six million Jews and millions of others in their tyranny.
Francis Gajowniczek, the man Father Kolbe gave his life for, endured five years of incarceration and starvation. He was moved to a different camp by the Germans, and the prisoners there were liberated by American troops who found them emaciated from starvation. Only twenty-three remained alive out of the five hundred men in Gajowniczek’s group.
Francis made his way home to Poland in November, 1945 to find his wife and sons who he so much wanted to come back to after seven years. He managed to find his wife but, sadly, his two boys had died when the Russians bombed his hometown. He immediately thought that he had nothing to live for. But he remembered the words of Father Kolbe in Bunker 14A: “Accept God’s will.” Francis realized that there was nothing he could do and decided to dedicate his life to sharing the story of Father Kolbe’s extraordinary act of love. This would be an inspiration for all of mankind and a debt he felt he needed to repay. He spent the next five decades honoring the man who died on his behalf.
Because of Francis’ commitment, the story had spread throughout Europe and eventually the entire world.
On October 10, 1982, Father Kolbe was canonized as a saint and declared a martyr of charity by Pope John Paul II at St. Peter’s Square, witnessed by the man whose life he saved, along with two hundred thousand people. Maximilian Kolbe's feast day became August 14, the day he was executed. He became the patron saint of drug addicts, political prisoners, families, journalist, amateur radio, prisoners, and the pro-life movement. Pope John Paul II declared him "The Patron Saint of Our Difficult Century".
Francis Gajowniczek died at age 95 on March 13, 1995, at Brzeg in Poland, having gone back every year to Auschwitz on August 14. He always considered it his duty to tell people about the heroic self-sacrifice made by Maximilian Kolbe.
Father Kolbe`s life serves as a tribute to the millions who perished in World War II. His extraordinary practice of love gave hope and peace to so many people, shining the brightest light on the darkest hour.
Bibliography:
Maximilian Kolbe, Saint of Auschwitz by Elaine Murray Stone (Paulist Press, 1997)
Wikipedia, the on-line free encyclopedia
www.fatherkolbe.com
Editor’s favorite excerpt from the book: Maximilian Kolbe, Saint of Auschwitz by Elaine Murray Stone:
“When Fr. Kolbe chose the site for his new city in Japan, he selected acreage high above Nagasaki on the other side of a hill. The hill acted as a screen between the Garden of the Immaculate and the sprawling city below. Several people scoffed at the choice, saying it was too far from the center of activity. ‘Who would bother to go way up there?’
When the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki,
August 9th, 1945, the entire city was leveled. Hundreds of thousands were injured and killed, and many more died later from the effects of burns and radiation. But at the Garden of Mary not a building was damaged, nor was a friar or a student injured. Mary must have given Fr. Kolbe the insight to select that place so well shielded by the hills."
Love
Love is the essence of our being, the goodness in our hearts. It’s a constant in all that changes in life. We are united through its power and its energy compels us to reach out to one another. When we practice love, we transcend hatred, fear and suffering and create peace, joy and harmony.
“Whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a mental choice we make every moment of every day.” ~Marianne Williamson
Perseverance
Perseverance is the will to see things through until the end in spite of fear, obstacles, discouragement, and opposition. With perseverance, we can accomplish great things.
"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whater cost, must be attained." ~Marie Curie
Faith
Faith is a belief and trust in an idea without any evidence that the idea is true. With faith, we are optimistic and hopeful, which keeps us going through tough times and towards our dreams. When we practice faith, we see the impossible become possible.
“If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope.” ~Jacques-Yves Cousteau
|
