St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar, a priest, a theologian, a publisher, and a missionary. He was also one of the most devoted champions of the Rosary the twentieth century produced. And it was the Rosary that sustained him and his companions through the darkest imaginable hour of human suffering.
Kolbe was born on January 8, 1894, in Zdunska Wola, Poland. As a young Franciscan, he founded the Militia Immaculatae (Army of the Immaculate), a worldwide evangelization movement centered on total consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He established a religious community called Niepokalanow (City of the Immaculate) near Warsaw, which grew to become the largest Franciscan friary in the world, housing over 700 friars. He also founded a similar community in Nagasaki, Japan, in the 1930s. His commitment to the Rosary was absolute: he prayed it constantly and taught everyone he encountered to do the same.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Kolbe was arrested and eventually sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in May 1941. He arrived as prisoner number 16670. Even in the camp, he continued his priestly ministry in secret, hearing confessions, sharing his meager food rations, and praying the Rosary with fellow prisoners.
In July 1941, a prisoner escaped from Kolbe’s barracks. In retaliation, the SS deputy camp commander, Karl Fritzsch, selected ten men from the barracks to be starved to death in an underground bunker in Block 11. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out in anguish that he had a wife and children, Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. Fritzsch accepted the exchange.
The ten condemned men were locked in the starvation bunker, stripped naked, and given no food or water. What happened next astonished even the hardened SS guards. According to eyewitness testimony from Bruno Borgowiec, a Polish prisoner who served as an assistant and interpreter at Block 11, the bunker that normally echoed with screams and despair was instead filled with the sound of prayer. Borgowiec testified:
“In the cell of the poor wretches there were daily loud prayers, the Rosary, and singing, in which the prisoners of the neighboring cells also joined. When no SS men were in the Block, I went to the cell of the poor men and talked with them. At every visit, I found them praying aloud or reciting the Rosary.”
Father Kolbe led the prayers, consoled the dying, and prepared each man for death. One by one, over the course of two weeks, the other prisoners died. After fourteen days, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. The SS needed the cell for new prisoners and decided to end it. On August 14, 1941, the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a camp doctor administered a lethal injection of carbolic acid. Eyewitnesses reported that Kolbe raised his left arm calmly and waited for the needle. He was the last to die.
Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man whose place Kolbe had taken, survived the war. He lived until 1995, dying at the age of ninety-three. He spent the rest of his life testifying to Kolbe’s sacrifice and was present in St. Peter’s Square on October 10, 1982, when Pope John Paul II canonized Maximilian Kolbe as a saint and martyr of the Catholic Church.
Kolbe’s rosary, damaged but intact, was recovered from Auschwitz and is preserved as a relic.
Sources: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum (auschwitz.org); the testimony of Bruno Borgowiec, preserved in the canonization records; America Magazine, “St. Maximilian Kolbe: Auschwitz martyr” (August 14, 2024); EWTN Vatican, “St. Maximilian Kolbe: A Witness of Light in the Darkness of Auschwitz”; School of Faith, “Auschwitz and Kolbe”; and the Wikipedia entry on Maximilian Kolbe.