Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe

Rajmund Kolbe was born in Zduńska Wola, Poland, on January 8, 1894. His father was a weaver, his mother a midwife. At thirteen he entered the Franciscans’ school in Lviv, and in 1910 he took the habit with the name Maximilian. He studied in Rome, earned degrees in philosophy and theology, and went back to Poland to do something no friar did: he became a publisher. He founded Niepokalanów, a friary-city near Warsaw, where nearly eight hundred friars came to live, with their own printing presses. His monthly magazine printed almost a million copies. He also had a radio station and was planning an airport. He was a missionary in Japan and founded a friary in Nagasaki on the side of a hill, in a spot people thought was the wrong one: in 1945 it was the only building in the area left standing after the bomb. In 1941 the Germans shut down Niepokalanów, where thousands of refugees, many of them Jews, had been hidden in the meantime. Kolbe was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. In July, after a prisoner escaped, the commandant picked out ten men to be starved to death. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children. Kolbe stepped out of the line and asked to take his place. They let him. He died in the starvation bunker on August 14, 1941. Gajowniczek survived the war and lived until 1995. If your name is Maximilian, today is your name day.