Michael Pakaluk

How can it be that, simply from viewing a picture of someone, you can form a conviction that he is a saint? The conviction appears to be a mere intuition, but later you discover that it is well-grounded. So it was for me and Maximilian Kolbe. Before he was famous, upon seeing his picture in a parish newspaper - the familiar one, where he has his long beard and is in his habit - a heartfelt conviction arose in me that I should follow this man, because he was one of the "holy ones." And so I did follow him, and learned about his remarkable death and extraordinary life.

You probably know the basic facts of his death. Like other religious in Poland, he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. There, a prisoner escaped, and the concentration camp guards, following their usual mode of reprisal, were going to put ten innocent prisoners to death, through starvation in the notorious torture box, the "Hunger Bunker." One unfortunate man, when he was picked out of the lineup, shouted out, "My wife, my children!"

At that moment, Kolbe, standing nearby, came forward, identified himself as a Catholic priest, and said that he would take the man's place. The deputy camp-commander Karl Fritzsch agreed, and Kolbe went to the Hunger Bunker, spending the next several days encouraging the men there with prayers and hymns. He did not starve to death in the allotted time, so he had to be killed with an injection of carbolic acid.

Kolbe's life as an apostle in Poland and Japan, building up the Knights of the Immaculata, and teaching Catholic truth, was just as extraordinary, although quietly so. But here I want to focus on his death and its meaning.

If you have any doubts about the continuing power of Kolbe's death to inspire, I urge you to look into, and support if you wish, a new film about him, cleverly entitled Triumph of the Heart. The film's writer and director, Anthony d'Ambrosio, tells how he turned to Kolbe when he was suffering from a severe illness:

The darkness closed in, and I lost my faith. I didn't want to live anymore. But then I remembered Kolbe. . . .I thought about how he forged a brotherhood in that darkness, how he transformed despair into hope. Slowly, a light began to break through. Kolbe's story gave me a way forward, and this film is my way of sharing that light with the world.

But why does his death inspire? How does the self-sacrifice of one holy man "triumph" over the millions of murders by the Nazis?

When I studied Kolbe's cause, I found that one of the witnesses had commented that it was a miracle that Deputy Commander Fritzsch even let Kolbe take the place of the other man. It would have been more characteristic of him to mock Kolbe's idealism by sending him to the Hunger Bunker as an 11th man.

It was a miracle, too, I suppose, that a prisoner had escaped from Auschwitz (a rare occurrence) just when Kolbe was there; that the ten unfortunates were chosen from among Kolbe's group; that Kolbe happened to be standing right there; that Kolbe's words were even witnessed; that anyone lived to be able to give an account.

That's to say, we think of Kolbe's deed as an heroic act, as it was, but more fundamentally it was his acceptance of a gift, to play a role and to be a clear witness to a truth. When Kolbe was a child, the Virgin Mary appeared to him and held out two crowns, asking which he would pick, the white crown of holy purity, or the red crown of bloody martyrdom. And Kolbe replied that he would like both.

Which brings in yet another miracle about the whole thing, which is that the Nazis decided to inject him with carbolic acid on August 14, 1944, the vigil of the Assumption, so that his dies natalis, it turns out, was as closely placed to a great solemnity of Our Lady as possible.

And yet another miracle is that the man whom Kolbe saved (Franciszek Gajowniczek) survived Auschwitz and lived long enough to witness, as an 80-year-old man, Kolbe's canonization by St. Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square on...