Maximilian Kolbe

Maximilian Maria Kolbe (1894–1941) was a Polish Franciscan friar and priest who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz — an act of self-sacrificial love that stands as one of the most powerful testimonies to Christian charity in the twentieth century. Born Rajmund Kolbe in Zduńska Wola, then part of the Russian Empire (now central Poland), he reported experiencing a childhood vision of the Virgin Mary offering him two crowns — one white (purity) and one red (martyrdom) — and choosing both. He entered the Conventual Franciscan Order at age sixteen, taking the name Maximilian, and was ordained in Rome in 1918. Kolbe was a man of extraordinary intellectual energy and organizational vision. In 1917, he founded the 'Militia Immaculata' (Army of the Immaculate), a Marian evangelization movement. Upon returning to Poland, he established Niepokalanów (City of the Immaculate), a friary and publishing center near Warsaw that grew into the largest religious community in the world, housing over 700 friars and producing a daily newspaper, a monthly magazine with a circulation exceeding one million copies, and operating an amateur radio station. He later founded a similar community in Nagasaki, Japan. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Kolbe was arrested and eventually sent to Auschwitz in May 1941. When a prisoner from his barracks escaped, the SS selected ten men to die by starvation as punishment. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children, Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take his place. He was placed in an underground starvation bunker, where he led the condemned men in prayer and hymns. After two weeks, Kolbe was the last of the ten still alive; on August 14, 1941 — the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption — he was killed by lethal injection of carbolic acid. Gajowniczek survived the war and attended Kolbe's beatification in 1971 and canonization in 1982, when Pope John Paul II declared Kolbe a 'martyr of charity.' He lived until 1995.