So Maximilian Kolbe And Franciszek Gajowniczek Meet In Heaven …

 

 

 

No, this is not a punch line. I was reading my devotional this morning while Martha, Sarah, and Jeffrey were all snug in their beds and came across the Christian church's commemoration today of two men both killed by the Nazis. I'd never heard of Kaj Munk, a Danish playwright and Lutheran pastor arrested and shot for criticizing the occupation. I only slightly better knew Friar Kolbe's story, that he took the place of a man the Nazis were going to kill in Auschwitz. And died a martyr, in churchspeak.

But what about the man whose life he saved? That question sat in my mind until I got to my office today, and in the age of the Internet it is (most of the time) remarkably easy to find out what you want to know. So after getting the kids to Grandma's – and pray for Sarah now, please, as she was crying silently before I left and I couldn't tell whether she was sad (she was disappointed that Jeffrey “always” plays with her the games he wants to play and never what she wants) or getting sick – I got to work!

In more ways than one … anyway, Franciszek Gajowniczek was a Polish army sergeant in September 1940 (about my age now) when he entered Auschwitz about a year after his capture. Prisoner 5659 (Gajowniczek) was one of ten sentenced to die from starvation after another prisoner escaped, and as he was taken away screaming “My wife! My children!” Kolbe – Prisoner 16670 – volunteered to take his place. He was the last of the ten to survive and was put to death with an injection of carbolic acid.

Gajowniczek was reunited with his wife Helena at another concentration camp after it had been liberated by the Allies (he'd spent nearly five and a half years as a prisoner), but his children weren't so fortunate – they were killed when the Soviets bombed Nazi-occupied Poland in 1945. And for the rest of his life, Gajowniczek over the next fifty years considered it his duty to speak whenever he could, wherever he could, about “the heroic act of love by Maximilian Kolbe”. I would too.

I want to express my thanks, for the gift of life.

David