Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar who published newspapers, ran a radio station, and built a monastery outside Warsaw that housed hundreds of monks and, during the German occupation, thousands of Polish refugees — including roughly 2,000 Jews. The Gestapo arrested him in February 1941 and sent him to Auschwitz. Prisoner 16670.
In late July, a prisoner from Kolbe's barracks escaped. The standard reprisal was collective punishment: ten men would be selected to die by starvation in an underground bunker. The SS officer walked the line and pointed. One of the chosen men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children. Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. The officer looked at him. A priest was worth less than a laborer. He agreed.
Kolbe was locked in the starvation cell with the other nine. Witnesses reported that he led the men in prayer and hymns as they died one by one over the following two weeks. After fourteen days, Kolbe was still alive. The guards administered a lethal injection of carbolic acid. He offered them his arm.
Gajowniczek survived Auschwitz. He lived to be ninety-three. Every year on the anniversary, he returned to the camp and stood at the cell where a stranger had died so that he could go home to his family. That exchange — one life freely given for another — is the most irreducible act of repair a person can make.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."