Thursday August 14, 1941. The Murder of St. Fr. Maximilian Kolbe
Fr. Maximilian Kolbe in 1936.
Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar, was murdered by the Germans at Auschwitz. He had taken the place of a stranger when a group of men was picked out to be starved to death in an underground bunker as a German act of reprisal for an escape attempt. Men had been picked out at random to serve as an example, and when one man who was chosen cried out about his children, Fr. Kolbe volunteered. After a prolonged period of starvation, in which he was found to be constantly leading the victims in prayer, he was given a lethal injection as he remained alive, and the Germans wanted to clear the bunker.
Kolbe had entered religious life after having been profoundly impacted by a vision of the Virgin Mary when a child. In the vision, the Blessed Mother offered Kolbe a white crown for purity or a red one for martyrdom, and he responded that he'd take both. Both he and an elder brother became Franciscan.
Kolbe served in Asia as a Franciscan missionary, but had returned to his native Poland prior to World War Two. He was imprisoned after the German invasion for refusing to sign the document which would have recognized him as being of German ancestry, as his father was an ethnic German. In February 1941 the Germans shut down his monastery, which had served to house displaced Poles including Jews, and he was sent to Auschwitz.
He was canonized in 1982. The man whose life he saved, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was in attendance.
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