Maximilian Kolbe

Life and Ministry

Raymund Kolbe was born in 1894 to a working-class family in Russian-occupied central Poland, entered the Conventual Franciscans at thirteen, and took the religious name Maximilian Maria. He studied at the Gregorian University in Rome (doctorate in philosophy, 1915) and at the Pontifical Faculty of Saint Bonaventure (doctorate in theology, 1919). Returning to Poland he founded a vast Marian publishing apostolate at Niepokalanów west of Warsaw — by 1939 the largest Catholic publishing house in Poland, with a religious community of seven hundred friars and a magazine reaching a million subscribers. He spent six years in Japan in the 1930s establishing a sister monastery at Nagasaki on a hillside that, by his deliberate choice against local advice, faced away from the city and so survived the atomic bombing of August 1945 intact. He returned to Poland in 1936.

Circumstances of Death

The Niepokalanów monastery sheltered roughly two thousand Jewish refugees in the early months of the German occupation. Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo on February 17, 1941, and transferred to Auschwitz on May 28, 1941, as prisoner number 16670. In late July 1941 a prisoner escaped from his work block. The deputy commandant Karl Fritzsch ordered ten prisoners selected at random from the same block to die in the starvation bunker as a deterrent. One of the selected men, a Polish army sergeant named Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out in despair that he had a wife and children. Kolbe stepped forward from the assembled ranks and asked permission to take the man's place. Fritzsch allowed it. Kolbe and the other nine were taken to Block 13 and locked in the underground starvation cell. Kolbe led the others in prayer and song through what eyewitness orderlies called an unprecedented two weeks. He was the last alive on August 14, 1941, and was finished with an injection of carbolic acid by the camp doctor.

Legacy

Franciszek Gajowniczek survived Auschwitz, lived another fifty-three years, and attended Kolbe's beatification in 1971 and his canonization in 1982. Pope John Paul II canonized Kolbe as "martyr of charity" — a category that some Catholic theologians had argued did not exist as a formal title, since Kolbe was killed not for the faith directly but for an act of substitutionary charity that the faith required of him. The Niepokalanów monastery rebuilt itself after the war and remains an active Franciscan house. The cell in Block 13 at Auschwitz where Kolbe died is preserved as a chapel and is one of the most-visited spots in the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial.