In the Spring of 1941, after a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz, guards responded by randomly selecting ten other prisoners to be executed. By starvation.
When one of the ten selected reportedly cried out, “My wife! My children!”, prisoner #16770, German-Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe, who had already suffered severe beatings at the hands of guards, volunteered to take the man’s place.
Maximilian had been arrested six months earlier by the Gestapo for offering assistance to Jews and for participating in the Polish underground. Around three months later, he was taken to Auschwitz.
His beatings in the camp came as a result of using smuggled bread to serve communion to other prisoners. Even after being beaten, he continued to administer the sacrament.
Throughout the following several weeks of starvation and dehydration, prayers and songs of praise could be heard from among the ten prisoners, who had been isolated in an underground bunker. After approximately two weeks, Maximilian and the few others apparently still alive were murdered by lethal injection–the priest being reportedly conscious and kindly compliant at the time. Their bodies were then incinerated.
He chose to die, that a stranger might live.
His sacrificial death was the culmination of a life of costly love:
Several years earlier, as the Third Reich’s horrific agenda of genocide and “social engineering” became undeniably clear, Maximilian, who was of both Polish and German ancestry (born Rajmund Kolbe in 1894), chose to identify himself not as German (and so obtain German citizenship and assured safety) but as Polish:
He chose to share the fate of the countless victims of Nazi hate.
About twenty years earlier, in 1922, he founded a monastery outside of Warsaw, Poland. With the Nazi invasion, the monastery hid hundreds–somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 to 2,000–Jews, as well as other Polish refugees. Rather than passively resisting, the monastery publicly denounced the Nazi horrors by means of publishing anti-Nazi communications, until it was shut down.
Maximilian suffered from tuberculosis (then incurable) all his life. The following words are attributed to him:
“Hate is not a creative force. Love alone creates.”
He died on August 14th, 1941.
Hope Unbroken 
Sobering and profound! Thanks for sharing!!