Fr. Shenan J. Boquet: Saint Maximilian Kolbe: Lighting a Candle in the Darkness

“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” ~John 15:13

On August 14, 1941, a guard in Auschwitz entered a small underground bunker. Inside the bunker were four emaciated men. They were the last remaining survivors of a group that had originally included 10 men. Astonishingly, despite having spent over two weeks in the bunker, deprived of all food and water, these four were still alive.

The guard who entered the cell carried a syringe filled with carbolic acid. The commanders of the death camp had become impatient. They wanted the men dead and the bunker back. The guard went around injecting each of the men with the lethal poison.

As he approached one of the four men, that man calmly lifted his arm for the injection. In this, he was simply displaying the same, strange, courageous calmness that he had shown throughout the past two weeks. …