Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Raymund Kolbe was born on 8 January 1894 at Zduńska Wola in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. As a boy he had a vision of the Virgin Mary holding two crowns, one white for purity and one red for martyrdom. She asked which he wanted, and he said he would take both. In 1910 he entered the Conventual Franciscans, taking the name Maximilian, and he was sent to study in Rome, where he earned doctorates in philosophy and theology.

In Rome in 1917 he founded the Militia Immaculatae, the Knights of the Immaculata, to win the world for Christ through Mary. He was ordained in 1918 and returned to Poland. Although he suffered from tuberculosis, he began a monthly magazine, The Knight of the Immaculata, and in 1927 founded Niepokalanów, the “City of the Immaculata,” near Warsaw. It became a huge friary of some seven hundred brothers, with a printing house that produced magazines and a daily newspaper in hundreds of thousands of copies, and later a radio station. From 1930 to 1936 he did similar work in Japan, at Nagasaki.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Niepokalanów sheltered refugees, many of them Jews. In February 1941 Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo, and in May he was sent to Auschwitz as prisoner 16670. At the end of July a prisoner escaped, and the commandant chose ten men to die by starvation in reprisal. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children. Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place.

In the starvation bunker he led the others in prayer and hymns. After two weeks he was still alive, and on 14 August 1941 he was killed by an injection of carbolic acid. Gajowniczek survived the war and was present when John Paul II canonized Kolbe as a martyr in 1982.