Maximilian Kolbe at Auschwitz

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish friar of the Conventual Franciscans. In 1927 he founded Niepokalanów, a friary and publishing house near Warsaw, and he also served as a missionary in Japan. He was arrested at Niepokalanów on 17 February 1941, held in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison, and deported at the end of May to the German concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he became prisoner number 16670.

At the end of July 1941, after a prisoner escaped, the camp leader Karl Fritzsch chose ten prisoners to die by starvation as a reprisal. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, a Polish soldier, pleaded for mercy for the sake of his wife and children. Father Kolbe, who had not been chosen, stepped out of the line, spoke directly to the SS men and asked to take his place. Fritzsch agreed, and Kolbe was led away with the other condemned men to the starvation bunker in the cellar of Block 11.

Men condemned to the starvation cell were given neither food nor water. After more than two weeks, on 14 August 1941, the SS ordered the cell to be emptied. A few of the men, Kolbe among them, were still alive, and they were killed with an injection of phenol.

Franciszek Gajowniczek survived the war. He was present at the Vatican when Pope Paul VI beatified Kolbe on 17 October 1971, and again on 10 October 1982, when Pope John Paul II canonised him in St Peter’s Square. In his homily that day the Pope decreed that Kolbe, until then venerated as a confessor, should from then on be venerated also as a martyr, and he noted that Gajowniczek was there among them.