The heroism of father Kolbe’s / By Lawrence Elliot

The heroism of father Kolbe’s / By Lawrence Elliot

            “On October 10’ 1982, the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed Francis friar Maximilian Kolbe its first saint and martyr to emerge from the Second World War.

            Towards the end of a stifling hot day in July 1941, a prisoner slipped from a work party at Auschwitz concentration camp and disappeared. When his absence was discovered at evening roll-call, search parties set out after him. If the fugitive was not found in 24 hours, the camp commander announced, ten of the 600 men of his cell-block, selected at random, would be put to death in reprisal.

            Death was no stranger at Auschwitz. But for the desolate men crammed together in the filthy rooms of Block 14, anticipation of the gruesome lottery was a particular torture. As the long night wore on, none could be blamed for secretly hoping that the fugitive would be caught.

            But he was not caught. He was never heard from again, and passes into history—having set the stage for what, 30 years later, Pope Paul VI described as “probably the brightest and most glittering figure” to emerge from “ the inhuman degradation and unthinkable cruelty of the Nazi epoch.”

            No one slept in Block 14 that night. Each man faced his own agony of soul. Dignity, home, freedom, family—all had been lost, now life, too, was in the balance. As one prisoner, former Polish soldier Francis Gajowniczek, hope was especially real. He believed that his wife and two sons were alive. If only he survived this purgatory, he would find them, and together they would rebuild their shattered lives.

            On a near-by bunk lay a commercial artist, Mieczyslaw Koscielniak, who had lost hope altogether. “The lucky ones were already dead.” he remembers thinking. “And the Nazis had reduced the rest of us to animals who would steal for a mere crust of bread. Except for the priest.” 

            Even then, Koscielniak knew that the priest was different. Often ill, feebler than many of the others, still the priest seemed always to have a morsel of food to share. If he could stand, he would work; if another faltered, he would share his load. He heard confessions in secret, and even during that endless night Koscielniak remembers seeing the priest kneeling by the bed of a sobbing youth, telling him that “death is nothing to be afraid of.”

            Tension mounts.

            By the time the prisoners lined up for morning roll-call, the sun was burning down relentlessly. The other cell blocks were soon marched off to work, but the men of Block 14 remained standing in the quadrangle. They stood all that day, ten ranks of living skeletons.

            At 6 p.m, the camp commander, Colonel Fritsch, announced that the fugitive had not been found. He would now choose the ten who must die; they would be taken to the death bunker in Block 13 and left to starve.

            The selection took only a few minutes, but for the waiting men it was an eternity. Boots grinding on the baked ground, Fritsch moved up one rank and down the next. Ten times he spotted, pointed and spoke a single word into the harrowing silence: “You!” Each time, guards shoved the condemned man up front. Some of the ten wept. One, the soldier Gajowniczek, cried out, “My wife! My poor children!”

            As the guards prepared to march the doomed men off, there was a sudden stir in the formation. An eleventh man was coming forward—the priest. “What does that Polish swine think he’s doing?” Fritsch shouted. But the priest kept coming, unsteady, face white as death, ignoring the raised weapons of the guards. Finally, he spoke: “May it please the Lagerfuhrer, I want to take the place of one of these prisoners.” He pointed to Gajowniczek. “ That one.”

            Fritsch glared at the emaciated apparition before him. “Are you mad?” the German snapped.

            “No,” the priest replied. “But I am alone in the world. That man has a family to live for. Please.”

            “Who are you?”

            “I am a Catholic priest.”

            The watching men stirred nervously. Koscielniak recalls thinking: “Fritsch will take both him and Gajowniczek.” And what did Fritsch think, staring at the serene eyes in that wasted face? Did he realize in that transcendent moment that he was in the presence of a force stronger than his own? Those who remember say that his gaze faltered. “Accepted,” he muttered, and turned away.

            The men of Block 14 were stunned. “We couldn’t understand it,” says Koscielniak today. “Why would a man do such a thing? Who was he anyway, that priest?

            He was Maximillian Mari Kolbe, a Franciscan friar, and in time, Koscielniak—and the others who survived—would understand that they had witnessed the making of a saint.

            Raymond Kolbe—he took the name Maximilian when he entered the Franciscan order—was born in a poor Polish village in 1894, and by the age of 13 had already decided to be a priest. At ten, he had told his mother of a mystical experience in which the Virgin Mary had offered him a choice of two crowns—the white signifying purity; the red, martyrdom. “I choose both,” the boy had said.

            He contracted tuberculosis as a youth, and was never thereafter wholly free of illness. But “he was a most gifted youth,” said one of his professor at the Gregorian University of Rome. At 21 he had a doctorate in philosophy. A year after his ordination, he earned another, in theology. He might have made a brilliant Church career.

            But his calling lay elsewhere. In 1917, he had organized in Rome the Militia of Mary Immaculate, a crusade to win back a world profaned by war and self-indulgence. Returning to Poland, and working alone in the face of his superior’s surprise and perplexity, he began publishing a monthly magazine, Knight of the Immaculate, to spread the gospel of God’s love. When circulation hit 60,000 Father Kolbe was forced to look for somewhere to accommodate the growing magazine and the Franciscan brothers who kept arriving to help him.

            In 1927, he put up a statue of the Virgin Mary in a field about 40 kilometres from Warsaw—the start of what was to become the world’s largest monastery, Niepokalanow. By 1939, there were more than 750 friars at Niepokalanow, and they were turning out up to a million copies of the Knight each month. But 1939 was also the year Hitler attacked Poland and began the Second World War.

            Strongly opposed to the Nazis, Father Kolbe was arrested even before Warsaw fell. And though he was released soon after, he knew the reprieve would be brief. He rushed back to a bombed and plundered Niepokalanow to establish a haven for refugees, and eventually 2,000 found shelter there. He even published one last issue of his beloved magazine. “No one in the world can alter truth,” he wrote then. “All we can do is seek it and live it.”

            On February 17, 1941, the Nazis came for him again. This time, suspected of being an enemy of the Third Reich, Father Kolbe was sent first to a Warsaw jail and then to Auschwitz. He arrived in a cattle truck packed with 320 others, to be greeted by back breaking labour, meager rations of bread and cabbage soup and daily dehumanization.

            One day, struggling under a heavy load of wood, Father Kolbe stumbled and fell, and was beaten nearly to death by a guard. He was brought back to precarious life in the camp hospital by a Polish doctor named Rudolf Diem. As he was unable to work, he got only half a ration of food, but still often gave part of that to younger patients.

            Ill as he was, weighing about 44 kilos, Father Kolbe could have slept on a real bed in the hospital. “But he insisted on a wooden bunk with a straw mattress,” recalls Dr Diem. “He wanted to leave the bed to someone whose lot was worse than his.” Towards the end of July, feeling better, the priest was assigned to Block 14. It was only a few days later that the prisoner escaped and Father Kolbe reached out for the red crown of martyrdom.

            The ten who had been left to starve to death now lay naked on the cement floor of a dank underground cell in Block 13. Sometimes they moaned or cried out in delirium. But as long as they were conscious they responded to Father Kolbe’s assurances that God had not forsaken them. While they had strength, they prayed and sang.

            After a few days, the guards, who had seen hundreds die but none who had faced the end with such tranquility, refused to go near the cell, and sent a Polish orderly to remove the bodies of those who had died.

            In Block 14, the soldier Gajowniczek was at first bewildered by Father Kolbe’s sacrifice. He wept and refused to eat. Then Koscielniak brought him to his senses: “Take hold of yourself! Is the priest to die for nothing?” In that moment, Gajowniczek made up his mind that he must live. He would not waste Father Kolbe’s gift.

            At the end of the two weeks, only four men were still alive in the bunker, and of those Father Kolbe was the last to die. it was as if he had to help each comrade through the final trial before he himself could be free. At that, the Nazis had to finish him off. They came with an injection of carbolic acid on the fifteenth day of his agony, August 14, the eve of the Assumption. Smiling, whispering “Ave Maria,” the priest held out his arm for the needle.

            Four long years later, the horror over, Francis Gajowniczek made his way back to what had beed his home in Warsaw and found it bombed to dust. Both his sons had been killed, but he found his wife safe. The two moved to a small village and began a new life.

            Then Gajowniczek heard stunning news: word of Father Kolbe’s martyrdom had reached the Vatican, and it had been proposed that he be beatified, a preliminary step to canonization as a saint. Gajowniczek was called upon by the Church to testify, as were others who had witnessed Maximilian Kolbe’s selfless life and heroic death. Finally, after 24 years of painstaking investigation, the justice of the cause was affirmed.

So it was, that on October 17, 1971, there gathered before the high altar of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome 8,000 men and women who had journeyed from Poland for the solemn ceremony of beatification. Among them were Francis Gajowniczek now pensioned and white-haired, as well as Koscielniak. A portrait of the Blessed Father Kolbe was unveiled and, for the first time in memory the Pope himself presided over the holy rite.

“Millions of beings were sacrificed to the pride of force and the madness of racialism,” said His Holiness. “But in that darkness there glows the figure of Maximilian Kolbe. Over that immense antechamber of death there hovers his imperishable word of life: redeeming love.”

So Father Kolbe lives on, a symbol of the world’s unknown sacrifices and unrecognized heroism. He gave the gift of life to one man, and to countless others the heart to outlast the tyranny that beset them. And to all men he leaves the legacy of his unconquerable spirit.

“People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes”             -Abigail Van Buren