Italy – Pope Benedict XVI has marked Sunday the 70th anniversary of the death of a Polish Franciscan friar hailed as a martyr for volunteering to die in the place of another man at Auschwitz.
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Benedict said Maximilian Kolbe’s heroic act set an example “amid the human drama of hatred, suffering and death.” The pope was greeting Polish pilgrims after his Angelus prayer delivered Sunday from his summer residence near Rome.
The German-born Benedict, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth, visited the Auschwitz concentration camp during a trip to Poland in 2006.
Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz in 1941 after Nazi officials discovered he had been hiding Jews. He was canonized by Polish-born Pope John Paul II in 1982.
Rest in peace
I cannot help but beam with pride at such a story! What a righteous gentile! I have no words…I’m speechless. I cannot even describe how I feel about such a thing.
All I can do is ask for HaShem’s help, that I live my OWN life as righteously as this man did. That I live for Truth, and be NOT AFRAID to stand for Israel always.
G-d bless you all!
The movie “Amen” had a character based on this person.
Sorry for dampening the euphoria a bit: this Catholic priest, of German and Polish descent btw, died at Auschwitz I taking the place of another Catholic Pole – a thoroughly Christian concept and not accepted in halakha as you can see from the teshuvos of Harov Ephraim Oshry ztz”l written in the Kovno ghetto. And though Kolbe occasionally helped Jews during the early phase of WW II, he also published some vile anti-Semitic pamphlets right after WW I.