The Angel of Auschwitz

By Richard N. Ostling

Poland's Maximilian Kolbe is declared a Catholic saint

"Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Repeating those words of Jesus (John 15:13), Pope John Paul II last week presided over the canonization of a fellow Pole who greatly inspired his own vocation as a priest: Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a Franciscan friar who died for his faith--and to save another man's life--at the most notorious of Nazi death camps.

At the end of July 1941, a commandant at Auschwitz arbitrarily selected ten men to be starved to death in reprisal for the escape of one inmate. Francizek Gajowniczek, one of the ten, cried out for his wife and two children. Father Kolbe, 47, a political prisoner, offered to take Gajowniczek's place. Consigned to a basement cell, Kolbe survived about two weeks without food or water, consoling his fellow victims with prayers, until a prison guard finally killed him with an injection.

The canonization ceremony for Kolbe in St. Peter's Square was attended by 150,000 worshipers, among them 5,000 Catholics who came from Poland legally and hundreds of others who surreptitiously slipped out of that troubled country. After the rite, John Paul stepped down from the altar platform to kiss and embrace Gajowniczek, now 81, who had wept silently through the service. Gajowniczek recalls: "I was never able to thank him personally, but we looked into each other's eyes before he was led away."

Although 50 Polish bishops were at St. Peter's, the country's Primate, Archbishop Jozef Glemp of Warsaw, stayed at home because of his fear of civil unrest. He celebrated an outdoor Mass at Niepokalanow (City of the Immaculate), a friary founded by Kolbe 25 miles west of Warsaw. John Paul, in a noontime address following the canonization, denounced the dissolution of the independent union Solidarity as "a violation of the fundamental rights of man and society." (Poland's state radio and television censored this criticism in its coverage of the ceremonies.) Next day, facing an audience that included a stone-faced government delegation from Poland, the Pope pleaded for the release of his homeland's political prisoners.

The day before the canonization, terrorists, armed with hand grenades and submachine guns, killed a two-year-old boy and wounded 38 other Jews leaving festival services in Rome's largest synagogue. In his sermon honoring Kolbe, the Pope said, "The tragic fate of so many Jews destroyed without pity in the concentration camps has already been condemned, firmly and irrevocably, by the conscience of humanity. But unfortunately, even in our own time criminal episodes of anti-Semitic hatred are repeated." He then denounced the "execrable attack" of the preceding day. Jewish leaders nonetheless complained bitterly that the Pope's September meeting with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had helped create a climate for the incident.

The unusually swift canonization of Kolbe was pushed by John Paul and Pope Paul VI. Both men considered Kolbe to be an exemplar of priestly discipline and self-giving, and of Christian virtue in a century of inhumanity. Saints are usually not proclaimed till at least 50 years after the process begins. Kolbe reached beatification, the next-to-last step, in 1971, as Paul VI became the first Pontiff to perform such a ceremony personally. After beatification, the church must normally document two miracles resulting from prayers to the candidate to intercede with God. John Paul removed the need for that by proclaiming Kolbe not only a "confessor" but a martyr, a Christian who died for his faith. As it happened there were several reports of miracles that the Vatican could have investigated.

The son of weavers, Kolbe was renowned in Polish Catholic circles long before his heroic death at Auschwitz. Fiercely devoted to the Virgin Mary, Kolbe, though often gravely ill with tuberculosis, founded a sizable Marian society, and followers started "Maryvilles" in Japan, Brazil and Illinois. Kolbe also created Niepokalanow, which became the world's largest friary. In this self-contained community of 800, the priests and brothers served in every role from fireman to mechanic. Before World War II, the friary's monthly magazine, Knight of the Immaculate, boasted an impressive 1 million circulation. Members of the community also ran a daily newspaper and a radio station.

An articulate opponent of Nazism, Kolbe courageously cared for hundreds of Jewish refugees and was a marked man when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. In Auschwitz, where priests were singled out for special brutality,Kolbe shared his meager food rations and spent much of his time comforting others. Some survivors said it was Kolbe's counsel that inspired them to go on living. For a new biography of Kolbe, A Man for Others (Harper & Row; $12.95), California Journalist Patricia Treece interviewed Sigmund Gorson, a TV personality in Wilmington, Del., and the only Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who knew Kolbe. Gorson, then a 13-year-old orphan, recalls: "He used to wipe away my tears. Because of the death of my parents, I had been asking, 'Where is God?' and had lost faith. Kolbe gave me that faith back. He was like an angel." --By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Barry Kalb/Rome

With reporting by Barry Kalb

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