[Note: This post was written by our foreign correspondent, Brandon Jean, currently on assignment in Japan.]
I visited Nagasaki City for a second time and I made sure to visit the St. Maximilian Kolbe Memorial Museum. St. Maximilian is a modern Saint and one of my favourites. He grew up in Poland (born in 1894) and was very devoted to Mary. One night as a child, Mary appeared to him holding two crowns: one red and one white. Mary told him that they represented purity and martyrdom and asked if he would accept one of them. St. Maximilian said that he would accept both!
At 16 he joined the Franciscans and started writing and publishing articles and building friaries around the world. Between 1930 and 1936 he worked in Nagasaki City, Japan, where he founded a monastery, a Japanese newspaper, and a seminary. Shinto priests told St. Maximilian not to build the monastery on the side of the mountain that he was planning to build it on because that side was out of harmony with nature. St. Maximilian decided to build the monastery there anyways. When the atomic bomb was dropped, the monastery was spared because the other side of the mountain took the main force of the blast.
The Franciscans called St. Maximilian back to Warsaw and when the Nazi's invaded Poland, he was sent to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Later, when one of the prisoners in the camp went missing, ten people were chosen at random to be executed as punishment. One of the men chosen was Francis Gajowniczek. Francis had a wife and children and pleaded with the officers to spare his life. St. Maximilian stepped forward and asked to take the man's place. Amazingly, the officers agreed to the switch and St. Maximilian and 9 others were placed in the starvation block.
(Click on the image for a full size version.)
Francis remembers the moment like this,
“I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me, a stranger. Is this some dream?
I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. ... The news spread quickly all around the camp. It was the first and last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.”
The conditions in the starvation bunker were terrible but St. Maximilian encouraged the others and never complained. At every inspection, he was seen either kneeling or standing and looking cheerfully at the SS officers. Two weeks passed in this way until finally St. Maximilian was executed with an injection of carbolic acid on August 14, 1941.
The memorial museum in Nagasaki City contains many artifacts of St. Maximilian's time in Japan as well as pictures of his time in Auschwitz. Visiting was a very emotional experience for me. The room the Saint lived in was preserved there and I was able to sit at his actual desk. In 1981, when Pope John Paul II visited, he sat at that desk as well!
(Click on the image for a full size version.)
The museum had an English guided tour recorded and it quoted Jesus' words from John, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” St. Maximilian laid down his life for a perfect stranger! Francis Gajowniczek lived to be 95 years old. Maximilian Kolbe bought him 53 years of life.
More photos from my visit to the museum are posted at http://gonnajetnow.shutterfly.com/pictures/405
In Christ,
Brandon Jean
