By Rev. Father Omokugbo Ojeifo
In the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz where prisoners were not known by name but by the number tattooed on their forearms, it was strange that the SS commando kept asking the priest, “Who are you?” There was a certain restlessness about the question.
In 1941, Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Conventual Franciscan Polish priest, theologian, journalist, and evangelist offered his life in place of a man — an SS sergeant Franciszek Gajowniczek — who had been singled out for death by starvation because a prisoner escaped under his watch. The sergeant broke down weeping because he didn’t want to die. He had a family he wanted to be reunited to. This was how Father Kolbe stepped up and volunteered to take the man’s place.
The cruel commando who kept asking Father Kolbe who he was couldn’t come to terms with this kind of behavior; in a camp where people would do anything to live, who was this man who was willing to offer his life in place of another?
In the starvation cell, Kolbe is led other prisoners in prayer as they died one by one. Though he was held without food or water for two weeks, he did not die of starvation. Instead, camp guards killed him with an injection of carbolic acid on Aug. 14, 1941.
The Christian form of love remains an enigma to this world. When Pope John Paul II canonized Father Kolbe in 1982, he named the priest a “martyr of charity” and “a prophet of the civilization of love.”
We know who Kolbe is and what he stood for – love without limits, love even unto death. The question for me and for you, today’s Christians, is “Who are you?”
