"Forget Not Love: The Passion of Maximilian Kolbe" 
by André Frossard
Ignatius Press, Published 1991
Even amid the current financial crisis, most Americans have life pretty good. One has only to read Frossard’s book about Maximilian Kolbe to be reminded how brutal and cruel life can be. St. Kolbe was a Franciscan who gave his life at Auschwitz so that a prisoner with a family might live. To read this story about his life and accomplishments makes the ending all the more tragic and serves to remind us regarding the horrors that humans can inflict on each other – and the tremendous acts of kindness that such horrors can inspire.
Kolbe was born to religious parents, who joined separate orders after he left home; his brother also became a Franscican, although he died as a young man due to appendicitis. Kolbe started the Knights of the Immaculata (Marian Militia) while studying with the Franciscans in Rome at the Seraphic College. At the Grodno monastery in Poland, Kolbe created and published a newspaper in the 1920s dedicated to all things Marian. Its circulation grew from 5,000 to 60,000 to "several hundred thousand" at the Grodno monastery in Poland; eventually he received a donation of land near Warsaw which would become Niepokalanow (“City of Mary”). In 1937, he had 600 religious in Poland and 27 seminarians at his monastery, and his 3 publications had about 1.1 million subscribers.
He traveled to Japan to start publishing in Nagasaki in 1930, where his newspaper became the most popular Catholic publication in the country. His monastery survived the atomic bomb and opened its doors to the numerous orphans created as a result. He also traveled to India and started a monastery there as well.
Kolbe did all this while suffering from tuberculosis and a collapsed lung; despite his frail health and admonitions from his physicians, he continued in his ministries up until the time the Nazis took over Niepokalanow in 1939. First he went to the camp at Amtitz, and then to Schildberg, (a former monastery), but he was allowed to return to Niepokalanow with the other religious in December 1939. Kolbe repeatedly asked permission from the Nazis to restart printing, and while he waited for a response the monastery became a service center for the locals, providing medical care, repairs and food to 3,500 refugees, including 1,500 Jews. The paper was allowed a single issue on December 8, 1940, which was not well received by the Nazis and led to Kolbe’s arrest again in February 1941 based upon an unsubstantiated claim that he was housing subversives.
Kolbe was sent to Pawiak prison; twenty of his priests at the monastery wrote the Gestapo and offered themselves in exchange for Kolbe, but their offer was refused. He was beaten and then sent to Auschwitz on May 28, 1941. Twelve Auschwitz survivors testified about Kolbe’s smiling nature and his refusal to be concerned about his own physical suffering and abuse at the camp. When the commander announced that 10 men were to starve to death as punishment for an escapee, Kolbe volunteered to take the place of Francis Gajowniczek, who cried out of concern for his wife and children.
The 10 men entered their cell naked, which was only 3 meters square and empty except for a slop bucket and a small window near the ceiling. During his captivity, guards and survivors remembered Kolbe routinely praying and singing canticles. The prisoners lived 14 days and, on the vigil of the Assumption, Kolbe was given a fatal dose of phenic acid.
Frossard, author of “Be Not Afraid: Conversations with John Paul II”, is a natural writer whose appreciation of Kolbe clearly shows; it is no surprise that Frossard dedicates the book to John Paul II, who canonized Kolbe. At 199 pages, the book is an easy read and shows that Kolbe not only deserved his canonization as a martyr but also for living a saintly life long before his fatal trip to Auschwitz. I would recommend this book as evidence that, even in the face of suffering and cruelty, Christ can inspire us to great works and to make the greatest sacrifice of all.