The Story of St. Maximilian Kolbe, Who Took Another Man's Place at Auschwitz
He asked to be killed instead of a man he had never met. The man lived another fifty-four years.
In the last week of July 1941, a prisoner escaped from Block 14 at Auschwitz. The camp’s response was standard procedure: the deputy commandant lined up the dead man’s fellow prisoners and picked ten at random to be locked in an underground cell and starved to death as a warning.
One of the ten, a Polish army sergeant named Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children.
A thin, sick, forty-seven-year-old priest stepped out of the line and asked to take his place.
Before the camp
He was born Rajmund Kolbe in 1894 in Zdunska Wola, in the part of Poland then ruled from Russia, and took the name Maximilian when he entered the Conventual Franciscans. Nothing about the first half of his life suggests the second.
He was, of all things, a media entrepreneur. In 1917 he founded a movement called the Militia Immaculatae, and he grasped earlier than most churchmen what printing presses could do. In 1927 he established a friary west of Warsaw called Niepokalanow, the City of the Immaculate, and built it into one of the largest religious communities in the world, running a publishing house whose flagship magazine reached a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.
Then he did something stranger. In 1930 he went to Japan, arrived in Nagasaki knowing no Japanese, and within a month was publishing a magazine in it. He founded a friary there, and sited it against local advice on the far side of a mountain ridge rather than in the city. In August 1945 the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki. The ridge shielded the friary, and it survived.
He returned to Poland in 1936 and was there when the Germans came.
Niepokalanow in the war
The friary became a refugee center. Something like two thousand people were sheltered and fed there, many of them Jews. Kolbe kept publishing, which under occupation was itself a provocation, and the Gestapo took an interest.
He was arrested in February 1941 and sent to Auschwitz in May, where he became prisoner 16670.
The bunker
After Kolbe volunteered and the guards accepted the substitution, the ten men were put in an underground starvation cell in Block 11.
What is recorded of the next two weeks comes largely from a camp interpreter who could hear into the cell. He described something that had not happened in that bunker before: prayer and singing, led by the priest, and men dying with some measure of composure rather than in the usual state. Guards who had done this many times found it unnerving.
After about two weeks, Kolbe and three others were still alive and the cell was needed. On August 14, 1941, they were killed by an injection of carbolic acid. His body was cremated the following day, August 15, the feast of the Assumption, which for a man whose entire life’s work had been dedicated to the Immaculata is the kind of detail nobody would dare invent.
Franciszek Gajowniczek survived Auschwitz. He lived until 1995 and died at ninety-three, fifty-four years after the morning he was pulled out of that line. He was present in Rome when Kolbe was beatified, and again when he was canonized.
The argument over whether he was a martyr
Here is the part that gets left out, and it is the most interesting thing about his cause.
A martyr, in the Church’s technical vocabulary, is someone killed in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith. That definition matters, because a martyr’s cause moves differently and does not require the same miracles.
Kolbe presented a genuine problem. He was not killed for refusing to renounce Christ. He was killed because he volunteered to take a stranger’s place in a reprisal, and the SS obliged him. Was that martyrdom, or was it heroic virtue of another kind?
The commissions could not agree. When Paul VI beatified him in 1971, it was as a confessor: someone who suffered for the faith without being killed for it. That was the cautious reading, and it was defensible.
John Paul II, a Pole who had lived through the same occupation, took a different view. At the canonization in 1982 he declared Kolbe a martyr of charity, holding that a death freely accepted out of love was a death for the faith, whatever the killers thought they were doing. It was a real development in how the category is understood, made deliberately and in public.
The whole thing took forty-one years from his death to his canonization, which by the standards of how long these causes usually run is very fast indeed, and the healings examined along the way went through the ordinary scrutiny.
The part that belongs in an honest account
One thing has to be said, because this site’s whole claim is that it will say things like this.
The publications Kolbe’s community produced in the 1930s, in particular its daily newspaper, carried material that has been criticized as antisemitic, of a kind that circulated widely in Polish Catholic nationalism between the wars. Scholars disagree about how much of it he wrote, how much he approved, and how much he simply presided over as the head of a very large publishing operation, and they disagree about how heavily it should weigh.
What is not in dispute is what he did when it cost him something. Niepokalanow sheltered thousands of refugees, many of them Jews. He died in a German camp. Both the writings and the sheltering are in the record, and a reader is better served knowing about both than being handed only the half that flatters.
Why he is asked for
He is invoked as the patron of prisoners, of journalists and those who work in media, of families, and of people fighting addiction. The prison patronage is obvious. The others come from the life before the camp, which is the part most accounts skip past in a hurry to reach the ending.
That is a shame, because the ending only means what it means because of what came before it. A man who spent twenty years building a publishing house and a friary and a mission in a foreign country had a great deal to lose, and knew exactly what he was giving up when he stepped out of that line.
He is the patron of prisoners because he was one. He is worth remembering because for about ten seconds on a July morning, in the worst place human beings have ever built, the arithmetic of the camp was interrupted by someone volunteering.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.