Maximilian Kolbe

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan who ran one of the largest religious publishing operations in Europe from a friary outside Warsaw, and spent six years founding a mission in Nagasaki. When Germany invaded Poland, the friary took in thousands of refugees, among them some two thousand Jews, and Kolbe kept printing. He was arrested in February 1941 and sent to Auschwitz as prisoner 16670. That July a man escaped from his block, and the guards chose ten prisoners to be starved to death in reprisal.

When one of the ten, a sergeant named Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children, Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. He led the men in prayer in the bunker for two weeks; when four were still alive the guards ended it with an injection of carbolic acid, and Kolbe was the last. Some historians fault the pre-war tone of his press toward Jews, a charge his defenders contest. Gajowniczek lived to be ninety-three and stood at Kolbe's canonization in 1982.