Raymund Kolbe was born to a Polish mother and an ethnic German father in 1894, when Poland was still part of the Russian Empire. At age 12, he experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary in which “she came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked me if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.”
The next year, he entered the Catholic Franciscan order and, taking his final vows in 1914, adopted the names “Maximilian Maria” — reflecting his devotion to the Virgin — in place of “Raymund.” Having demonstrated considerable academic ability, he was sent to Rome in 1912, eventually earning doctorates there in both philosophy and theology.
While in Rome, Kolbe also founded an organization to work for the conversion of opponents of the Catholic Church, and most especially of Freemasons, seeking the intercession of Mary on their behalf. To that end, he composed a special prayer: “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee. And for all those who do not have recourse to thee, especially the Masons and all those recommended to thee.”
In 1918, the same year in which the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I and granted independence to Poland, Kolbe was ordained a Catholic priest. The next year, he returned to his newly free native land where, although suffering from tuberculosis, he devoted himself energetically to teaching, evangelization and religious publication.
Then, from 1930 until 1936 (when his still-poor health forced him to return home), Father Kolbe served briefly as a Catholic missionary in China and Japan and for a much longer period in India, founding monasteries in the two latter countries. In 1938, again back in Poland, he launched a Catholic radio station to supplement his publishing activities.
On Aug. 23, 1939, however, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, publicly pledging mutual nonaggression and privately defining how they would carve eastern Europe up between them. A week later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west, opening World War II. Two weeks thereafter, Stalin invaded Poland from the east. At least 6 million Poles, including 90% of Polish Jews, would die during World War II and the Nazi and Soviet occupations.
Recognizing his father’s ethnicity, Nazi authorities at first offered Father Kolbe citizenship in the Third Reich, but he refused it. Arrested just weeks after the Nazi invasion, he was released three months later. Thereafter, he continued to publish on a reduced scale (including, surreptitiously, numerous anti-Nazi materials) while organizing a small hospital in his monastery that also sheltered wartime refugees (among them roughly 2,000 concealed Jews).
Ultimately, though, Father Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and, as Prisoner 16670, sentenced to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. There, notwithstanding poor health and occasional torture, he continued to function as a priest and confessor.
Late in July 1941, however, a prisoner seemed to have escaped. (It was later discovered that he had actually drowned in a latrine.) The rule at Auschwitz ordained that, when an inmate escaped, 10 prisoners from his camp sector should be sentenced to death in the so-called “starvation bunker.” On this occasion, one of those so condemned cried out, “My poor wife! My poor children! What will become of them?”
Witnessing this, Father Kolbe addressed the German officer in charge: “I am a Catholic priest,” he said. “Let me take his place. I am old. He has a wife and children.” “What does this Polish dog want?” the Nazi demanded. Surprisingly, when he finally understood Father Kolbe’s request, he granted it.
According to postwar testimony, Father Kolbe led his fellow condemned prisoners in regular daily prayers. Finally, though, after two weeks of starvation and thirst, he alone remained alive. When impatient guards gave Father Kolbe a lethal dose of carbolic acid on Aug. 14, 1941, he calmly raised his left arm to receive the injection. He was 47. His body was cremated on Aug. 15 — the feast day of the Assumption of Mary.
Father Kolbe was canonized by his fellow Polish priest, Pope John Paul II, on Oct. 10, 1982. Today, a statue of St. Maximilian Kolbe stands among the 10 20th-century martyrs above the Great West Door of London’s Westminster Abbey.