Missionary
🇵🇱Maximilian Kolbe
1894–1941 · Polish · Franciscan priest · Martyr of Auschwitz
“Hatred is not a creative force. Only love is a creative force.”
Biography
Raymund Kolbe was born to a poor weaver's family in Zduńska Wola, Poland, and entered the Franciscan order as a boy, taking the name Maximilian. He was a tireless evangelist and publisher: in 1927 he founded the friary-city of Niepokalanów near Warsaw — at its height one of the largest friaries in the world, printing a magazine with a circulation near one million — and in 1930 he sailed for Nagasaki, Japan, to plant a mission and printing house in a society with almost no Christians. When the Second World War broke out, Niepokalanów sheltered thousands of refugees, among them some two thousand Jews. Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1941 and deported to Auschwitz in May, prisoner 16670. In late July, after an escape from the camp, the deputy commander chose ten men from Kolbe's block to be starved to death in reprisal. When one of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children, Kolbe stepped out of line: 'I am a Catholic priest. I wish to die for that man.' For two weeks in the starvation bunker he led his fellow condemned in prayer and hymns; on 14 August 1941 the guards ended his life with an injection. Witnesses said he raised his own arm to receive it.
Key Works
Kolbe's first 'works' were two centers of gospel publishing: Niepokalanów in Poland and the 'Garden of the Immaculate' in Nagasaki — the latter, built on the sheltered side of a mountain, survived the 1945 atomic blast and stands today. His monthly Knight of the Immaculate reached a circulation near one million, among the largest religious periodicals in Europe; he founded a radio station and planned films — one of the first to put mass media wholly in service of the gospel. But his best-known work is those two weeks in the starvation bunker of Auschwitz: a cell that had known only cursing and wailing was filled, because of him, with prayer and singing.
Legacy
Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man he saved, survived the camp and spent the rest of his life telling what happened that day; when Kolbe was canonized in 1982, the old soldier stood in the crowd. The church calls Kolbe a "martyr of charity." His story crosses every denominational and national line because it turned John 15:13 into visible fact: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." Countless people first grasped the word "substitution" by looking at him — one man stepping into another man's death. Kolbe himself would have said he was only imitating the Lord who first died in his place.
Walking Together