The memorials of two martyrs who died during WWII occur only five days apart: Carmelite Edith Stein on 9 August and Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe on 14 August. Both died in Auschwitz, Kolbe in 1941 and Stein in 1942. Their sacrifices sanctified the world.
Kolbe, a Polish Conventual Franciscan was born on Jan 8, 1894. His death at age 49 was the result of an heroic sacrifice rooted in a mystical experience. One day after he had been scolded for childhood misbehavior, Mary appeared to him as he said his night prayers. She held two crowns. A red one represented the crown of martyrdom and a white one represented the crown of purity. She asked if he were willing to accept either of them. He replied he would accept both.
He entered the Franciscans despite chronically poor health due to TB. The disease did not slow him down. He went on to found a number of friaries, published a monthly magazine, and was sent to Japan in 1930. He was called back to Poland as the first rumblings of WW II sounded in the background.
He was arrested along with other Franciscans in 1941. Initially interred in Pawiak prison he was sent to Auschwitz soon after. Three prisoners escaped Auschwitz in July. The camp commanders, using the standard sociopathic logic characteristic of the Nazis randomly chose ten prisoners from a line-up. They were to be put into “The Bunker,” an airless underground space where they would slowly die from starvation and dehydration. When chosen as one of the ten forty-two year-old Franciszek Gajowniczek cried out, “Oh my wife, my children. I shall never see them again.”
Kolbe stepped from the line. He negotiated a trade and took Gajowniczek’s place in the bunker.
The ten men languished without food or water for two weeks. One-by-one their voices disappeared until only Kolbe's remained. Because the executioners needed the bunker he was taken to sick bay where, in a primitive model for physician-assisted suicide he was injected with camphor. He died quickly.
There is follow-up. Kolbe was beatified in 1971 and canonized on 10 October 1982. Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man for whom Kolbe sacrificed his life attended both ceremonies. Gajowniczek survived five years in the camps, dying in 1995 when he was 94 years old, fifty-four years after Kolbe took his place in the bunker. During a visit to the U.S. Gajowniczek’s translator explained, “He told me as long as he had breath in his lungs he would consider it his duty to tell people about the heroic act of love of St. Maximilian Kolbe.”
We never know the hour or the day when we will be called to step up to save another, to help another, or even to die for another. Kolbe's life ended as the result of a sacrifice he could not have anticipated when he woke the morning he exchanged himself for Gajowniczek. In the end he did receive both crowns that Mary offered him so many years earlier.
St. Maximilian Kolbe pray for us.
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I've had a longstanding devotion to St. Maximillian that became even more significant when I pronounced first vows as a Jesuit 25 years ago today. Will celebrate two Masses on this memorial a bit later in the AM.
The photo is a full moon hovering over Mt. Equinox in Vermont.
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