Auschwitz volunteer
by Mike Oettle
“GREATER love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends,”[1] said Jesus, talking of His own death but also, I am sure, thinking of those after Him who also would selflessly give themselves for others.
Jesus’ words must have gone through the mind of Rajmund Kolbe one July day in 1941 when the commandant of Auschwitz paraded the inmates of the camp’s Block 14 after a prisoner had escaped.
The commandant’s way of dealing with escapes was to take 20 prisoners, lock them in a cell and starve them to death. This evening he was feeling
generous: only 10 prisoners would be starved.
Before making his selection he had already had the Block 14 prisoners standing on parade in the sun the entire day. Now he began choosing the unlucky 10. No 4 was a Polish sergeant named Francicek Gajowinczek, who broke down crying for mercy: “I have a wife and two children. I want to see them again. I don’t want to die.”
Rajmund hurried from the ranks and tried to kiss the commandant’s hand. Pushing him away, the commandant asked in German: “What does this Polish pig want?” Rajmund said he wanted to take the sergeant’s place. He and nine others were marched off.
Who was this man who took the place of a compatriot?
Kolbe was born in Poland under Russian rule, on 8 January 1894 in the town of Zdunska Wola, in Wielkopolski province, south-west of Warsaw and close to the border of Silesia, then in Germany. Brother Kenneth, CGA,[2] tells us that when Rajmund was 10 his mother scolded him, asking: “What ever is going to become of you?”
That night he had a dream in which the Virgin Mary came to him and offered two crowns, one white and one red. The white crown meant that he would join a religious order and give up thoughts of marrying and having children. The red crown meant martyrdom. In his dream he chose both.
Now knowing what would become of him, Rajmund joined the Franciscan Conventual order when he was just 13. In 1910, when he was 16, he took on the names Maximilian Maria, and in 1912 went to Rome, where he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Even before being ordained priest (in 1918, the year of Poland’s liberation), he and six friends formed a missionary crusade which they called the Militia of Mary Immaculate. Having entertained ideas of being a soldier, Maximilian – though seriously ill with tuberculosis – now saw himself at the age of 25 as a soldier of Christ and formed small groups of devout Catholics all over the Polish Republic.
In 1922 he began a popular Catholic monthly called Rycerz Niepokalanej (The Knight of Mary Immaculate). In 1927 he put his ideas into concrete shape (his magazine was circulating at 70 000 copies a month) and founded a religious centre at
Teresin, west of Warsaw, calling it the Niepokalanów[3] (the City of Mary Immaculate). It soon became one of the world’s largest
Franciscan houses. He later founded similar centres in Japan (1930) and
India.
In 1936 his superiors called him back to Poland, to head both the Niepokalanów and
Poland’s largest Catholic publishing house.
September 1939 saw the nazi German invasion of Poland and the deportation of most of the brothers at the Niepokalanów (including Maximilian) to Germany. But inexplicably they were freed, and returned. The Niepokalanów became a refugee centre housing 3 000 homeless Poles, including 2 000 Jews.
In 1941 only one edition of Rycerz Niepokalanej was published. In it Maximilian
wrote so forcefully against the evil in the land that he was arrested and sent
to Warsaw’s infamous Pawiak prison. Here an SS guard asked him: “Do you
believe in Christ?” “I do,” Maximilian responded. The guard hit him, repeated
the question and mercilessly hit him again and again. Still Maximilian said: “I
do.”
Maximilian, stripped of his Franciscan habit and wearing a prison uniform, was sent to Auschwitz and branded with the number 16670. With other priests, he was made to labour at building the crematorium, under the eye of the sadistic guard “Bloody” Krott.
Maximilian Kolbe was an example to his fellow prisoners even before volunteering for the starvation cell. In that cell he neither begged nor complained. Others rushed the door for food whenever it was opened, and were beaten or shot. When the cell was inspected, the others were found lying down; Maximilian, if not on his knees, was standing in the centre of the room smiling at the guards.
After two weeks, Maximilian was the sole survivor. The cell was needed for other prisoners, and on 14 August a death injection of phenol was ordered. With a prayer, Maximilian offered his arm.
On 17 October 1971 Pope Paul VI visited the Niepokalanów
basilica for the solemn beatification of Maximilian Kolbe. Present in the congregation was Francicek Gajowinczek, making “a dramatic footnote to Kolbe’s sacrifice”.[4]
