St. Maximilian Kolbe: The father who gave his life for a dad

Today we look at a 20^thCentury missionary, Maximillian Kolbe.

Raymond Kolbe was born on January 8, 1939 in Poland, the second son of his father, a weaver, and his mother, a midwife.

In adulthood, Raymond joined the Conventual Franciscan Order, took the name Maximilian, and was ordained a priest. He eventually received a doctorate in both philosophy and theology.

His priesthood was an incredibly active one. Not only did he have his own publishing house, he also founded Franciscan houses in China and Japan, and started radio stations.  In 1936, Fr. Kolbe had to return to Europe from Asia because of poor health.

Unfortunately, however, World War Two came along, and Adolf Hitler was waging his campaign of hate across Europe.  Millions of people were being sent to concentration camps to be tortured and killed.  Among the groups that Hitler targeted were gay men, Jews, Gypsies, and Catholic priests.

In May of 1942, the Nazis captured Maximilian Kolbe, known to the Nazis as “Number 1-6-6-7-0,” and sent him to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. 

Often the guards would torture prisoners and kill them for their own amusement.  Maximilian accepted his fate as God’s mysterious choice for him.  And though it was illegal to do so, Maximilian ministered to his fellow Franciscan friars and all the other people.  He told them to trust in God and to believe that in the end, God’s justice would prevail. 

Maximilian would try to be at the beginning of the food line so that he could take the watery top of the soup, leaving the richer portions below for other prisoners.  Often, he gave away his scraps of food for others to eat. 

At the end of July 1942, someone escaped from the cellblock where Maximilian was kept.  As a punishment, every man had to stand at attention for hours in the heat. In the evening, 10 men were chosen arbitrarily by the guards for slow execution in starvation bunker #11.  As the men began to remove their clothing, Fr. Maximilian stepped out of line and said to the guards, “I am old and useless. My life isn’t worth much now.”  He asked that he be one of the ten men to be killed so that a young father with a wife and two children could live.  The guards agreed, and they let the young father, a Polish army sergeant named Franciszek Gajowniczek, be spared the starvation experience.  Fr. Maximilian took his place.

Fr. Maximilian, with the other 9 men, was stripped naked and put into a squalid death hole.  The iron doors were closed, and the men were left to starve to death without food or water.  Fr. Maximilian comforted his fellow sufferers, and for the first time in Auschwitz, the sound of hymns came from the bunker’s mean air holes. 

After two weeks, only 4 of the men were still alive, and Fr. Maximilian Kolbe was the only one still conscious.  Because the Nazis needed the bunker to kill other men, they took Fr. Maximilian and injected phenol into his bloodstream, killing him.  The date was August 14.  On August 15^th, his body was thrown into an oven, and his ashes were joined to countless others who had been killed at Auschwitz.

Maximillian was canonized in 1982.  One of the people attending this event was the man whose life Maximillian had saved, Franciszek Gajowniczek.

St. Maximillian’s feast day is August 14.  He is a patron saint of amateur-radio operators, drug addicts, political prisoners, families, journalists, and those who cherish human life.