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
