Today’s Faith on the Road reflection takes us to a place of pure evil that we visited on our 2019 Poland pilgrimage. I had never thought I would share these images or our visit, this place troubled me spiritually and physically as we walked the grounds and to this day gives me great anguish to remember.
Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The ominous words hanging over the gate to Auschwitz I with its Arbeit macht frei sign (“work sets you free”). In Auschwitz, an estimated 1.1 million humans were slaughtered by the evil Nazi regime between 1940 and 1944. Auschwitz-Birkenau was built because Auschwitz’s gas chambers couldn’t handle the demand of the Nazi’s.
Walking through these grounds on our tour, I could feel the physical presence of the lingering evil that was unleashed here. In the short time within Auschwitz I, I could feel the weight pressing down upon me. With each step I prayed alternating “Hail Mary, Full of Grace” and “For the sake of His Sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”
“But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” Romans 5:20
Yet, even from this evil flowed great mercy. We are given one of the greatest saints of mercy of our days and a great example of selfless love and mercy in action. Prisoner 16670, Father Maximillian Kolbe.
At the end of July 1941, one prisoner escaped from the camp, prompting the deputy camp commander to pick ten men to be starved to death in an underground bunker to deter further escape attempts. When one of the selected men cried out, “My wife! My children!”, a Catholic Franciscan priest, Father Maximillian Kolbe volunteered to take his place.
According to eyewitness reports, Father Kolbe led the prisoners in prayer in his prison cell. Each time the guards checked on him, he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. After they had been starved and deprived of water for two weeks, only Father Kolbe remained alive. When the Nazis finally came it is said Father Kolbe raised his left arm and calmly waited for the deadly injection of Carbonic Acid. He died on 14 August 1941. His remains were cremated on 15 August, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary.
St. Maximillian Kolbe was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 10 October 1982. Upon canonization, the Pope declared Maximilian Kolbe as a confessor and a martyr of charity. Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man Kolbe saved at Auschwitz, survived the Holocaust and was present as a guest at both the beatification and the canonization ceremonies. Gajowniczek died just six weeks later and is the only ‘civilian’ buried at Niepokalanów, the monastery founded by St. Kolbe.
Even from one of the most evil and vile locations on earth and within the scope of human history radiates the greatness of God’s Divine Mercy. St. Kolbe is a great mercy saint and has continued to lead many to Divine Mercy and loving sacrifice. Fathers, mothers, grandparents and all Catholics can look to St. Kolbe as example of how to give one’s life fully in love to and for another by simple loving acts done within the moment of every day.
No matter the depths of man’s evil and sin, God’s Divine Mercy is infinitely greater.
“But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” Romans 5:20
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” Tertullian – 197 A.D