Latest / Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast / St. Maximilian Kolbe — The Saint at Auschwitz Who Traded Places With a Stranger

Transcript

St. Maximilian Kolbe — The Saint at Auschwitz Who Traded Places With a Stranger · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

• 0:00
  When he was just 12 years old, a Polish boy named Raymond knelt in front of a statue of
• 0:06
  Mary and asked her privately, what would become of him? He said she appeared holding two crowns,
• 0:12
  one white, one red. The white one meant a pure ordinary life. The red one meant martyrdom.
• 0:21
  She asked him which one he wanted. He said he wanted both. 35 years later, in a starvation
• 0:28
  cell at Auschwitz, Both promises came due at once.
• 0:44
  Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. This is episode 21. If you're new here,
• 0:50
  welcome to the porch. Pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee or a lemonade and stick around.
• 0:56
  We look at a new saint every single Thursday. Quick thing before we get into it. Just this
• 1:01
  previous Tuesday, I dropped a special one. Why do Catholics pray to saints? No saint story
• 1:08
  that day, just a straight answer to a question a lot of people quietly have. If you missed
• 1:14
  it or forgot it happened, it's still sitting right there in your feed. Definitely worth
• 1:18
  a listen. And I'd love to know your thoughts. Well, you already know the setting for this
• 1:24
  one, even if you don't know the man. This is the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Raymond
• 1:31
  Kolbe was born in January of 1894 in a small Polish town called Zdarnska Wola, the second
• 1:39
  son of a weaver and a midwife. His mother, by her own later account, was at her wits' end
• 1:45
  with him as a boy. Restless, strong-willed, the kind of child who wears a parent thin.
• 1:51
  One day, she asked him, more out of exhaustion than anything else, what was going to become
• 1:57
  of him? That question is what sent him to pray in front of that statue of Mary. The vision
• 2:03
  of the two crowns is the answer he came back with. He joined the Franciscans as a teenager.
• 2:10
  And when he formally entered religious training at 16, he traded the name of Raymond for a
• 2:15
  new one, Maximilian. He studied first in Poland and then in Rome. And this is the part that
• 2:21
  tends to surprise people, earned two separate doctorates, both in philosophy and theology,
• 2:27
  while he was still a young man. In the summer of 1917, still a seminary student, he founded
• 2:35
  an organization in Rome built around using every modern tool available to spread honor for Mary.
• 2:42
  The thinking behind it was almost military. An army of ordinary Catholics, organized and
• 2:48
  equipped, competing for the hearts and minds the same way any other movement of that era
• 2:53
  was learning to compete. That instinct is part of why printing presses and radio waves would
• 3:00
  make so much sense to him later on. He was ordained a priest the following year and came home to
• 3:06
  Poland to teach. He didn't want a quiet classroom though. He wanted to reach as many people as
• 3:13
  possible, as fast as possible, with as much of his faith as he could get into their hands.
• 3:19
  In 1922, he started a small monthly magazine with a first print run of about 5,000 copies.
• 3:28
  Five years later, in 1927, he founded a monastery outside Warsaw. to house it and turn the whole
• 3:35
  operation into something nobody expected a monastery to be. That little 5,000 copy magazine grew
• 3:43
  right along with it. In 1930, Kobe took the whole operation overseas, founding a sister
• 3:49
  mission in Nagasaki, Japan, and publishing a Japanese language edition of the same magazine.
• 3:56
  Back home in 1935, he added a daily newspaper on top of it, one that was moving well over
• 4:03
  100,000 copies on a weekday and more than double that on Sundays. By the outbreak of World War
• 4:09
  II in 1939, that monastery, Niepokolanów, had grown into the largest Catholic religious
• 4:16
  community in the world. Nearly 800 friars and candidates lived and worked there, and the
• 4:22
  magazine alone had reached a circulation of roughly 750,000 copies a month, the highest
• 4:30
  of any publication in Poland. religious or secular. This wasn't a side project bolted onto a monastery.
• 4:37
  Niamh Pokhlaanuf was the media operation, decades before anyone would have used a phrase
• 4:44
  like that for a religious order, complete with its own printing presses and its own amateur
• 4:49
  radio station. Then Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and everything he'd built became a target.
• 4:58
  The Nazis arrested him. and the other friars within weeks of the invasion, though they were
• 5:04
  released that December. Kolbe kept publishing anyway. Coming home, he turned the monastery
• 5:10
  into a shelter for roughly 3,000 displaced people, about 2,000 of them Jewish families hiding
• 5:17
  from the Nazis, and his presses kept running material the occupying government did not want
• 5:23
  circulating. Now, that combination, hiding refugees and refusing to stop printing is what got him
• 5:31
  arrested again in February of 1941, this time for good. He was sent first to a prison in
• 5:38
  Warsaw, held there for over three months, and then transferred to Auschwitz that May. He
• 5:44
  was given a number now instead of a name, 16670. Camp Life at Auschwitz was built to strip away
• 5:54
  everything about a person except that number. Kolbe, weakened and sick, worked and suffered
• 6:01
  like every other prisoner there. At one point, beaten badly by a guard for simply being a
• 6:08
  priest, and then quietly nursed back to health afterward by fellow prisoners who hid him to
• 6:14
  do it. In late July of 1941, a prisoner disappeared from Colby's barracks. Camp policy for an escape
• 6:24
  was brutal and deliberately public. The camp's roll call commander, a man named Carl Fritsch,
• 6:32
  walked the assembled prisoners row by row and pointed at men one at a time, choosing 10 of
• 6:37
  them at random to be locked in an underground bunker and starved to death. A public warning
• 6:44
  to everyone watching. One of the men he pointed to was a Polish army sergeant named Franczyszek
• 6:51
  Gajów-Naczek. When his number was called, he didn't stay silent the way most condemned men
• 6:57
  in that camp had learned to. He cried out, he had a wife, he had two sons. He would never
• 7:04
  see any of them again. For a moment, nobody in that yard moved. Stepping out of line in
• 7:12
  front of an armed SS guard, uninvited, was the kind of thing that could get a man shot on
• 7:17
  the spot, no explanation required. Colby stepped out of line anyway. Fritch demanded to know
• 7:25
  what this prisoner wanted. Colby answered in plain, calm German. He was a Catholic priest.
• 7:32
  He had no wife and no children, and he was asking to take this man's place. Fritch was surprised
• 7:39
  enough by the request that he paused before answering at all. And then he agreed. Gajuvnicek
• 7:47
  was marched back into formation and by his own later account, he barely had time to process
• 7:53
  what had just happened to him before it was over. He could only thank Kolby with his eyes
• 7:59
  as the priest was led away with the other nine men instead. Prisoners sent to that bunker
• 8:05
  weren't expected to keep any dignity at all in their final days. A prisoner named Bruno
• 8:12
  Borgelwix was assigned to check on the cell and eventually clear the bodies out. And after
• 8:19
  the war, he gave a very detailed account of what he saw. He said the room had nothing in
• 8:25
  it but a bucket for waste. And that bucket, he said, was always found completely dry. The
• 8:32
  men were drinking out of it to survive. What Borgorovic's heard, though, was the part that
• 8:39
  stuck with him. instead of the screaming and cursing he was used to from that bunker. This
• 8:45
  cell echoed with prayers and hymns, quieter each day as the men grew weaker, but constant.
• 8:53
  Kobe, he said, never asked for anything and never complained. When the other men were begging
• 8:58
  for water or breaking down in despair, Kobe was the one calming them, encouraging them
• 9:03
  to hold on. Guards who looked in on the cell reported the same strange thing. Kolbe kneeling
• 9:11
  or standing calmly in the middle of the room looking back at them without fear when every
• 9:16
  other prisoner they had ever put in that bunker had been curled up on the floor. Some of the
• 9:22
  SS men reportedly couldn't hold his gaze and told him to look at the ground instead. After
• 9:30
  two weeks, six of the 10 men had died from starvation and dehydration. Kolbe was one of the four
• 9:37
  still alive. The Nazis needed the cell cleared for the next group. So a guard came in and
• 9:45
  killed the remaining men with an injection of carboic acid. Kolbe was 47 years old. His
• 9:52
  body was cremated the very next day, August 15th, the same date the church celebrates as
• 9:58
  the feast of the assumption. That prisoner, Gajudnicek, survived Auschwitz. He survived
• 10:06
  the rest of the war. He made it home to his wife, Helena. Though his two sons had been
• 10:11
  killed in 1945 before the fighting in Poland was even fully over. For the rest of his own
• 10:18
  long life, he carried the strange weight of knowing that a stranger had died in the exact
• 10:24
  spot that was supposed to be his. Now, not guilt by his own account, but a kind of debt he never
• 10:32
  stopped trying to repay. He spent decades traveling and speaking about it as a lay missionary.
• 10:38
  making sure Colby's story didn't get forgotten. In 1971, Pope Paul VI beatified Colby, the
• 10:47
  first formal step towards sainthood. But he beatified him specifically as a confessor,
• 10:54
  the church's term for someone who lived an exceptionally holy life without necessarily dying for the
• 11:01
  faith in the strict legal sense. Some church officials had pushed for martyr. instead, but
• 11:09
  classic martyrdom requires dying specifically because you were hated for your faith, and
• 11:14
  Colbe had technically volunteered to die in place of a stranger out of charity rather than
• 11:20
  persecution. It wasn't a clean fit. Eleven years later, Pope John Paul II overruled that technicality.
• 11:30
  At Colbe's canonization in 1982, he declared him a saint and specifically a martyr calling
• 11:37
  him a martyr of charity. Gajudnicek was there for both ceremonies, 11 years apart, watching
• 11:44
  the church argue its way to the same conclusion he had reached the moment Kolbe stepped out
• 11:50
  of that line. Which means, in a strange way, Kolbe ended up wearing both crowns exactly
• 11:58
  the way his childhood vision described. The white crown, the confessor's crown, came first
• 12:03
  in 1971. The red one, The martyr came second in 1982 after the church spent over a decade
• 12:12
  making sure it was getting the label right. Gajudvicek lived until 1995 at 93 years old
• 12:20
  and was eventually laid to rest at Nijampokalanuf itself, the same monastery Kolbe had built.
• 12:28
  All right, so let's play the truth or legend game before we head back to the porch. Three
• 12:33
  claims about Kolbe. Some hold up. Some don't. You decide. Claim number one. When Kolbe stepped
• 12:41
  forward to take Gajudinacek's place, he specifically told the guard that Gajudinacek had a wife
• 12:47
  and children while he himself did not. Claim number two. The vision of the two crowns, the
• 12:55
  one from his childhood, is confirmed in Kolbe's own official church record as a verified historical
• 13:00
  event, the same way his arrest and death are documented. Claim number three. The prisoner
• 13:08
  whose disappearance triggered the entire selection was later found dead inside the camp itself,
• 13:14
  meaning the search that got 10 men condemned had already become pointless before it even
• 13:20
  started. Got your guesses? All right, here we go. Claim number one is true. This detail comes
• 13:28
  from multiple accounts close to the event, including surviving witnesses. and it's one
• 13:33
  of the most consistently reported details of the entire exchange. Claim number two is legend
• 13:41
  in the sense that matters for how we talk about it honestly. It's a real story Colby told about
• 13:47
  his own life and the church treats it as a meaningful piece of his own devotional biography, but
• 13:54
  it rests entirely on his own private account, the same way any childhood vision does. It's
• 14:02
  not independently verified the way his arrest records or camp documents are. And finally,
• 14:08
  claim number three is probably true, but I want to be honest about the sourcing here instead
• 14:15
  of pretending it's airtight. It comes from a single well-regarded source rather than multiple
• 14:20
  independent camp records the way Borgovic's testimony does. So likely accurate, worth
• 14:28
  knowing, but held a little bit more loosely than the rest of his story. Okay, back to the
• 14:36
  porch. And I will preface this by saying this story sat with me differently than most that
• 14:45
  we've come across. So I keep thinking about those two crowns and how long it took the church
• 14:53
  itself to agree on which one Kolbe was actually wearing. Eleven years between confessor and
• 15:00
  martyr. Eleven years of very smart, very careful people arguing about the correct label for
• 15:08
  something that, to everyone who was actually there, I'm sure was never a question.
• 15:18
  That's actually where I think the real weight of this story sits. Not in the grand gesture
• 15:24
  itself, but in how ordinary Kolbe made it sound while doing something extraordinary. He didn't
• 15:34
  launch into a speech about sacrifice or heroism when he stepped out of that line. He just stated
• 15:42
  a fact. That man over there has a family and I do not. As if the math of it was simple.
• 15:53
  As if anyone in his position would have done the same thing. Honestly, almost nobody would
• 16:02
  have. And not to throw shade in my own direction, but I have very little confidence that in the
• 16:09
  matter of five seconds that I could make the same decision that Kolbe did. And that's exactly
• 16:16
  the point. Most of us will never face a choice on the scale Kolbe did, and I hope none of
• 16:24
  us ever do. But... There's a smaller version of it that shows up more than we'd like to
• 16:30
  admit. And for most of us, it won't look like anything like a starvation bunker. It'll look
• 16:38
  like letting a coworker take the credit for something you both built. It'll look like staying
• 16:46
  quiet about what a sacrifice actually cost you instead of making sure everyone knows. It'll
• 16:54
  look like letting someone else be right when being right yourself would have felt so much
• 17:00
  better. None of that makes the news. None of it gets a feast day. But it's the same shape
• 17:09
  of thing scaled down to a size the rest of us can actually carry. A moment where stepping
• 17:16
  aside costs you something real and you have to decide whether you are willing to pay it
• 17:22
  without making a whole production out of the decision. You don't need a title from Rome
• 17:28
  to know which crown you are wearing in that moment. You just need to notice it's being
• 17:35
  asked of you and do the next right thing anyway. So, here's the question that I'm sitting with
• 17:43
  this week. Is there a moment coming up in your life where you could quietly let someone else
• 17:51
  keep what they need, even the praise, and even if it costs you something real? And could you
• 17:59
  do it without making it about you at all? Interesting. It is now time for the closing prayer. Lord,
• 18:10
  thank you for Maximilian and for a love that didn't need a formal ruling to be real. For
• 18:17
  anyone listening who's facing a smaller version of that same choice right now, give them this
• 18:22
  kind of plain, quiet courage. And for anyone who, like Gajownicek, who is still carrying
• 18:30
  the weight of a gift they never asked for, Let them find peace in it, not guilt. Amen. St.
• 18:40
  Maximilian Kolbe is recognized as the patron saint of drug addicts due to the lethal injection,
• 18:46
  political prisoners, families, journalists, amateur radio operators, and the pro-life
• 18:53
  movement. His feast day is celebrated on August 14th, the anniversary of his death. Well,
• 19:01
  that is episode 21. this one stuck with you, send it to somebody who needs to hear that
• 19:06
  ordinary people are capable of extraordinary love. One more thing, that special episode
• 19:13
  I mentioned upfront seemed to land with some of you, so I'm thinking about doing more of
• 19:18
  them. Not saint stories, just straight answers to the kind of Catholic questions people ask,
• 19:24
  but don't always ask out loud. If there's one you've been sitting on, send it my way. Check
• 19:31
  the description of this show on how to contact me directly. And next week, we are back to
• 19:37
  an unknown saint. And no hint this week as I'm still researching which saint I am going to
• 19:42
  do it on. So check in next week to find out. I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on the
• 19:47
  porch with me and I will see you next week.