The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Maximilian Kolbe
1894–1941PolishRoman Catholic (Conventual Franciscan)
The Franciscan priest who stepped out of the line at Auschwitz and asked to die in place of a stranger with a wife and children.
Summary
- Lived 1894–1941, Polish.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Martyrs.
- Tradition: Roman Catholic (Conventual Franciscan).
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived2 moments · 1930–today
- May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Maximilian Kolbe at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.
Left safety in America to go home to Hitler's Germany, and was hanged days before the camp was liberated.