The State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau commemorated this August 14 the 85th anniversary of the death of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Conventual Franciscan who offered his life in exchange for that of another prisoner in the German Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.
According to the Museum itself, flowers were placed beneath the commemorative plaque of Block 17 and in front of the Wall of Death, in the courtyard of Block 11. Prayers were also offered inside cell 18, in the basement of Block 11, the exact place where Father Kolbe was killed on August 14, 1941.
The day’s Holy Mass was presided over by Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, Archbishop Emeritus of Warsaw, with the participation of Franciscan religious, the faithful, and pilgrims.
The “martyr of charity”
At the end of July 1941, following the escape of a prisoner, the camp authorities condemned ten men to die of starvation in retaliation. When one of those selected, Polish sergeant Franciszek Gajowniczek, lamented for his wife and children, Father Kolbe—prisoner number 16670—stepped forward and offered to take his place.
After two weeks of agony in the starvation bunker of Block 11, during which he sustained his cellmates with prayer and song, the executioners ended his life on August 14, 1941, with a phenol injection. His body was cremated the following day, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin, to whom he had consecrated his entire life and apostolate through the Militia of the Immaculata.
Gajowniczek survived the camp and was present in Rome when Saint John Paul II canonized Kolbe as a “martyr of charity” on October 10, 1982.
The Auschwitz Museum also recalled that it has a podcast dedicated to the arrest, imprisonment, sacrifice, and death of Father Maksymilian Kolbe.