Saints› Maximilian Kolbe
August 14
Maximilian Kolbe
Maximilianus Kolbe
1894–1941, Poland
Born Rajmund Kolbe in Russian-occupied Poland, he entered the Conventual Franciscans as a young man and took the religious name Maximilian Maria. Active before the war as a publisher and Marian apologist, he founded the city of Niepokalanów (“City of the Immaculate One”), at one point the largest religious community in the world.
Arrested by the Gestapo in February 1941 for sheltering Jewish refugees and Polish nationalists, he was sent to Auschwitz. In late July, after a prisoner had escaped, the camp commander ordered ten men chosen to die by starvation as a deterrent. One of the chosen, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children. Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. The request was granted.
He spent two weeks in the starvation bunker leading the others in prayer; when he was the last alive, the guards killed him on 14 August 1941 with an injection of carbolic acid. Gajowniczek survived the war and was present at Kolbe’s canonization in 1982; he lived another fifteen years afterward, dying in 1995.