Singing In Auschwitz

©2010, Randall A. Beeler

Courage, my sons, Don’t you see that we are leaving on a mission? They pay our fare in the bargain. What a piece of good luck! The thing to do now is to pray well in order to win as many souls as possible. Let us, then, tell the Blessed Virgin that we are content, and that she can do with us anything she wishes. (Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe)

I was in Saint Peter's Square on October 10, 1982 when Pope Venerable John Paul the Great presided over the canonization of Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe. I wasn't even Catholic.

Six months later I would be.

Father Kolbe stood in a line of prisoners at Auschwitz, from which line the Nazi commander was selecting 10 men to be slaughtered in retribution for a successful escape of prisoners the day before. Francis Gajowniczek, a Polish soldier picked by Commandant Fritsch as one of the 10, begged to be passed over because he wanted to see his wife and children again.

At that moment, Father Kolbe stepped forward and offered himself, an old priest, in place of Gajowniczek. Amazingly, the Commandant accepted the exchange, placing Father Kolbe with the others in Cell 13 of the starvation bunker, where prisoners received no food or water.

The conditions were beyond accurate description. Deprived of water, prisoners desperately consumed moisture from the slop bucket. But Father Kolbe sang hymns of love and praise to God in such a inspiring manner that the other prisoners joined him, even to the point of being oblivious to the guards who entered to remove the dead.

After more than two weeks, Father Kolbe and three others were still alive. Needing the cell for more executions, the Nazis removed Father Kolbe and the others and injected their veins with lethal carbonic acid. Father Kolbe offered his arm even as he murmured a prayer on his lips:

After the guard and the executioner left, I returned to the cell, where I found Fr.Maximilian Kolbe sitting down, leaning against the wall, with eyes opened and his head bent to the left side: it was his usual position.   His face, serene and beautiful, was radiant. (from the testimony of Mr Bruno Borgowiec)

What the world did not know at the time—indeed, what the world yet refuses to acknowledge even now—is that Christ, through His beloved, Father Kolbe, defeated the Nazis even before they had invaded Father Kolbe's Poland. For Christ's love shone through Father Kolbe, who did what he could to love his fellow prisoners and even to love his captors.

I cannot love like Father Kolbe; that is for Christ to forge in me. I can also tell you that, sinner that I am, I fight Christ's love, like the world fights it. But the battle is being won, even as I starve in the Auschwitz's that the spirit of antichrist commandeers me into and the slop buckets that the world offers me as fare.

For too long I've consumed that fare. But my voice is getting stronger, breathed into by the Spirit of Christ and the Father. I think I can sing hymns now, if in an off-key way.

I do not know if I will be graced to wear a crown of martyrdom. But, you and I, we must die in some way—we must enter the darkest prisons of our own making, if only to discover a reason to sing hymns: love. For the worst things that can be done to me are nothing next to the betrayal of love that I've inflicted on my Maker, my Beloved, my One True Master.

But, as Father Kolbe shows, Christ enters the cell before me, and if I have a reason to sing, it's because He gracefully pulls the blinders from my eyes to see Him there. How can I keep from singing?

Dear Lord, Rabouni! This isn't a starvation cell! It's Your empty tomb!

No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves? (Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe)