The Priest Who Stepped Forward

In July 1941, a prisoner escaped from Block 14 at Auschwitz. As punishment, the SS commandant Karl Fritsch lined up the remaining inmates and selected ten men to die by starvation. When Franciszek Gajowniczek heard his number called, he crumbled. "My wife," he sobbed. "My children. I will never see them again."

Then a small, bespectacled Polish priest stepped out of the ranks. Father Maximilian Kolbe, Franciscan friar, prisoner 16670, approached the commandant and spoke five quiet words: "I wish to take his place."

The guards were stunned. No one volunteered for the starvation bunker. Yet Kolbe walked into that concrete cell willingly, and for two weeks he led the condemned men in hymns and prayer as they slowly perished. When the guards came to finish it, Kolbe was the last one breathing — sitting upright, peaceful, his arm extended for the lethal injection.

Kolbe did not fight death from a distance. He stepped into it. He took a condemned man's sentence into his own body.