Father Kolbe was a Franciscan Priest who founded Niepokalanow (City of Mary), a large monastery in Poland dedicated to communications. Fr. Kolbe and his Franciscan brothers published dozens of weekly and monthly periodicals to promote the Roman Catholic faith and devotion to the Blessed Mother in particular. At one point in the late 1930s, circulation exceeded one million copies monthly, making Niepokalanow the largest publisher in Poland.
Fr. Kolbe was a Ph.D. level philosopher and an insightful theologian. In addition to his print operations, he built a religious short-wave radio station in 1938 with the call sign of SP3RN. Unfortunately, his plans to extend his amateur radio operations to his monastery in Nagasaki, Japan were not consummated.
On 26 May 1941 Fr. Kolbe's monastery was shut down by the
Nazi SS. Fr. Kolbe was arrested and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp,
where he was assigned Prisoner #16670. In July of 1941, ten prisoners
were condemned to death because of an escape attempt from the camp. Among
the condemned was Francizek Gajowniczek, a Polish
Sergeant. Kolbe stepped out of line and offered his life in
place of Gajowniczek's. The Nazi commandant accepted the exchange
and sent Kolbe to a camp starvation bunker where he was deprived of food and
water for nearly two weeks. Maximilian Kolbe died on 14 August 1941.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου