Maximilian Kolbe

Witness in Auschwitz

I always felt it was part of my job to push back against the school’s prevailing attitude that emotions were paramount, which was made much easier by the fact that, had I been the subject of Inside Out, it would have been one of the greatest flops of all time.

There were, however, two moments in the syllabus when I always struggled to keep my emotions in check, even though I knew what was coming. One was the WWII film London Can Take It. I could take any amount of burning buildings, devastated housing, wailing children - but what always brought a lump to my throat was an ARP warden picking a (live) cat from the rubble.¹ There is a pricking in my eyes even as I type. I’m not sure what this says about me, but there it is.

The other moment was in the A-level Germany syllabus when I told them about Saint Maximilian Kolbe, whose feast day was 14 August. (Actually it wasn’t in the syllabus, but I thought it was useful for them to know. My classes knew so many more interesting things than the mere syllabus). As you may well know, Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan executed in Auschwitz in 1942, having volunteered to take the place of Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom the guards had selected as one of ten who would be starved to death to deter escape attempts. The bit that caused me to choke up was telling the students that Gajowniczek was present at Kolbe’s canonization in 1982.²

Kolbe is officially described as a ‘martyr of charity,’ in that he was not specifically killed for the faith but as one who was killed in an expression of Christian orthopraxy. Nobody told Kolbe that he would be killed unless he renounced his faith, as with most martyrs of the Roman Empire, or Japan, or the Reformation, or the French Revolution, or the Copts beheaded on a beach. Nobody even threatened to kill Kolbe. Why should be deliberately choose to die? He (presumably) believed that he had been doing God’s will; was he not more use to God than Gajowniczek?

The history and theology of martyrdom is really interesting. The Almighty, as Hamlet noted, “fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” - at least, the Christian god did - but Christianity has always been quite happy about putting oneself in the line of fire, whether literally or through attending to the sick. There has always been a balancing prudential argument about recklessness and unnecessary risk, but the Church states that life, although an unalloyed good, is not the ultimate good.

If this sounds a little paradoxical, note that a society valuing life as the ultimate good also enthuses about abortion and euthanasia. I don’t pretend to understand this, or at least not within the parameters of a Friday newsletter.

The blood of martyrs, said Tertullian cheerfully, is the seed of the church. There have been plenty of saints whose ambition for suffering would be regarded by us today with a certain amount of alarm (“everybody hates me, I am the victim of malice and injustice and, what’s more, I have chronic consumption - and I say bring it on!!”). Not many people know that Saint Sebastian survived the arrows, picked himself up and went back to the emperor, who had him beheaded. But that wouldn’t have produced nearly so many homoerotic portraits, so the artists went with the arrows.

The embrace of suffering is another thorny theological matter than requires another few thousand words, so for today I shall simply draw upon the literary talents of Robert Bolt and John Buchan to put Kolbe into an everyday perspective.

When I was directing A Man For All Seasons, the young man playing More understandably needed some assistance with More’s peculiar obstinacy. Every other character in the play is baffled by More’s intransigence, so it was entirely in order that Greg should be so.³

I am frequently bothered by those theologians and writers who enthuse about the obliteration of the self. Why should God create unique individuals, only to insist that self-abnegation be their primary task on earth?

Because, in part, it’s not the obliteration of the self that’s in order but the recasting of the self. We are all the lead role in our own lives, obviously, but we are not the authors of the drama. This is neither a new nor a profound observation, but it helped Greg to understand More. What Thomas More believed was the unique importance of his own self within the context of a bigger story in which he was a supporting player. If the story required that he die for the successful execution of the plot; well then, who was he to subvert authorial intent?⁴

At least two of John Buchan’s heroes finish the novel by stepping into their own deaths.⁵ This can be viewed as a late-Victorian version of a trope of noble self-sacrifice, which is fair enough, but it’s still his Christian interpretation of an ethic not in itself exclusively Christian.⁶ Most obviously, no military could operate without the willingness of soldiers to die for others, but its dominical authority brought it outside the realms of the military. Christ laid the burden of the cross as a possibility for all Christians as an expression of love.

John 15:13 - Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

To put it another way, the little deaths of the self are fractal images of the ultimate gift: greater love hath no man than to lay down his life. Perhaps we struggle to comprehend Kolbe, casting the light of God in the midst of the darkness that was Auschwitz, because we struggle to cast the same light in the most opportune of surroundings.

Actually, let me be fair. Perhaps I struggle to cast the same light; I should not bring everyone else along with me.

We might also struggle to comprehend martyrdom such as Kolbe’s because we conceive of lives in the terms of complete narratives. We cannot conceive of a novel about, say, Waterloo that finishes on p32 when a random infantryman is killed. Martyrdom feels like willingly finishing on p32. There is no way of getting round this except to recast him (and ourselves) in the stories of others as part of the ultimate drama. Like Buchan’s heroes, Kolbe renounced the right to see ‘what happened next’ because the good of the story required his action at that particular point.

It is also the case that, despite ourselves, we view Auschwitz through the lens of 1945. In August 1942, nobody could have known - although some in high military circles may have been confident - that the good guys would win.⁷ We may all like to think that we would have been Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Claus von Stauffenberg, and we are all probably wrong, but Maximilian Kolbe…?

Fortunately we are not required to embrace or seek martyrdom. Fortunately, we have the calendar to remind us - to remind ME - that there are some crazy people out there, whose craziness is an abiding inspiration and rebuke.

1. 8:31 in the video.

2. It is a bitter tragedy that Gajowniczek’s sons were killed by a Soviet bombardment in 1945.

3. Greg is not his real name.

4. Does postmodernism therefore render martyrdom obsolete? discuss.

5. The Half-Hearted is one. The other slips my mind at the moment.

6. Think of Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities - yes, all right, Dickens is writing in a Christian milieu but the nobility and greatness of soul is not in this case explicitly Christian.

7. Were there ‘martyrs’ for Nazism (in the sense of ‘witness’)? That’s for another time, although I have addressed it already.