Auschwitz martyr remembered on death anniversary
PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki
14.08.2018 12:54
Events were on Tuesday held at the site of the former Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz to mark the 77th anniversary of the death of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan monk who volunteered to die for another prisoner in 1941.
Photo: PAP/Jan Graczyński
Several hundred people attended a Holy Mass celebrated by Kraków Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski at the site in southern Poland. Among those present were Polish Deputy Prime Minister Beata Szydło, German Archbishop Ludwig Schick, and members of Father Kolbe’s family.
Flowers were placed at the Wall of Death, which is close to a basement cell in which Father Kolbe was left to starve to death and where a prison guard finally killed him with an injection of carbolic acid.
He spent two weeks without bread and water in the bunker, before being given a lethal injection.
Father Kolbe was canonised in 1982 by Pope John Paul II.
Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man whom Kolbe saved and who had a wife and two children at the time, survived the war. He died in 1995.
(mk/gs)