The Freedom to Love: St. Maximilian Kolbe at Auschwitz

There are some saints whose lives are so extraordinary that, if I am being truthful, I sometimes have a hard time knowing what to do with them.

St. Maximilian Kolbe is one of those saints.

We know the ending of his story. Auschwitz and the starvation bunker. The condemned prisoner who cried out for his wife and children, and Fr. Kolbe, the Franciscan priest who stepped forward and offered to die in his place.

It is one of the most heroic acts in modern Christian history.

However, it is also the kind of story that can make sainthood seem very far away from the lives most of us actually live.

I am probably never going to be standing in an Auschwitz prison yard while ten men are chosen to die.

Most of us, thank God, never will.

But long before Auschwitz, when Maximilian Kolbe was still just a boy, something happened that has always fascinated me even more than the famous ending of his life.

He was offered two crowns.

The Boy Who Wanted Both Crowns

When Maximilian was young, he later recalled, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him holding two crowns.

One was white, the other was red.

The white crown represented purity and heroic virtue while the red crown represented martyrdom.

Mary then asked him which one he wanted.

I have always wondered what I would have said.

Probably something like, “Could I think about it for a while?”

Or perhaps, “What exactly does the red one involve?”

I might have looked around hopefully to see if Mary had brought a third crown that represented a reasonably comfortable life, good health, a loving family, and retirement somewhere warm.

Maximilian did not do that, he simply asked if he could have both, and according to his account, Mary granted his request.

There is something wonderfully childlike about that answer.

He could not possibly have understood everything he was asking for. How could he? He was a boy.

He did not know about Nazi Germany or about Auschwitz.

Or the terrible machinery that human beings would one day create to destroy other human beings.

He simply knew that if Mary was offering something that would bring him closer to Jesus, he wanted all of it.

Even the part he could not yet understand.

Maybe that is where holiness often begins.

Not in having everything figured out.

Just in saying yes.

The White Crown Came First

We tend to remember Maximilian Kolbe because of the red crown.

Martyrdom is dramatic.

It makes headlines, becomes stained glass , and the part of the story people remember.

But Maximilian had to wear the white crown long before he ever wore the red one.

He became a Franciscan priest and founded the Militia of the Immaculata.

As an aspiring entrepreneur for Our Lady, he built an enormous Catholic publishing apostolate in Poland.

He traveled to Japan as a missionary, preached, wrote, organized, and worked himself nearly to exhaustion.

And most of that probably did not feel particularly dramatic while he was doing it.

That is one of the things I increasingly appreciate about saints.

We generally only see their finished stories.

But along the way they also had to live Tuesday afternoons.

They had to get out of bed and deal with people who irritated them.

They had plans that fell apart.

Like us they got tired, dealt with illness, and had responsibilities they probably did not feel like dealing with.

Holiness very rarely announces itself while it is happening.

Most of the time, heroic virtue looks suspiciously like simply doing what needs to be done.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That was Maximilian’s white crown.

Long before Auschwitz, he had already spent years learning how to give his life away.

And Then the Red Crown Came

In 1941, Maximilian Kolbe was imprisoned at Auschwitz.

After a prisoner escaped, ten men were selected to die by starvation as punishment.

One of those men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children.

Kolbe stepped forward.

He offered himself instead.

The request was accepted.

And the boy who had once asked Mary for the red crown finally received it.

There is something almost unbearable about that.

He had asked for both crowns without knowing where they would lead.

Years later, standing inside one of the darkest places human beings have ever created, he still said yes.

He died in the starvation bunker on August 14, 1941.

But I have come to think that the greatest thing about Maximilian Kolbe is not simply that he did something heroic at the end of his life.

It is that he had practiced giving himself away for so many years that when the terrible moment finally came, love was already his habit.

Auschwitz did not suddenly create the saint.

It revealed the man he had spent a lifetime becoming.

And that is where his story starts to feel much closer to ours.

Most of Us Carry Two Crowns Too

None of us, I suspect, are waiting for the Blessed Virgin Mary to appear in the kitchen holding two crowns.

And if she did, I am not sure many of us would have Maximilian’s nerve.

But I sometimes wonder whether the ordinary human life eventually gives us both crowns anyway.

Not all at once.

Not dramatically.

Usually without asking us first.

The white crown comes in thousands of small opportunities to be good.

A mother getting up again in the middle of the night.

A father going to work when he is exhausted because the family needs him.

A teacher walking into a classroom and trying once more to reach the kid everybody else has given up on.

A nurse staying beside someone who is frightened.

A caregiver cleaning up a mess nobody else will ever know about.

A worker deciding to do an honest job even when the boss is nowhere around.

None of that is likely to appear in a biography.

There will probably never be a statue of us doing laundry.

But I wonder sometimes whether Heaven sees these things very differently than we do.

Perhaps heroic virtue is not always heroic-looking.

Sometimes it is simply love refusing to leave.

Then There Are the Crowns We Never Asked For

The red crown is different.

Most of us do not choose it.

It simply arrives.

Sometimes in a hospital room or in a doctor’s office.

Perhaps in a phone call or in a cemetery.

Sometimes in the middle of an ordinary day that, without warning, becomes the dividing line between everything that came before and everything that comes after.

There are parents who have had to give unborn children back to God before they ever had the chance to hold them.

Mothers and fathers who have held babies in their arms knowing they were saying hello and goodbye almost at the same time.

Families who have stood beside the graves of children and tried to understand how the world could possibly keep moving.

I have written before about that strange kind of grief, where love does not end but suddenly has nowhere obvious to go, in my reflection The Trouble With Hello Is Goodbye.

There are also people who know another kind of red crown.

The crown of illness, disability, chronic pain, or of dependence.

The crown of watching the life you expected disappear and trying to figure out how to live the life that is still here.

Sometimes courage looks like fighting for your life.

Or perhaps it looks like learning how to live after your life has been saved.

Sometimes it is getting through physical therapy.

Or the courage to allow somebody else to help you.

Sometimes it is waking up another morning and deciding that today is still worth receiving.

I have written about some of that in One More Morning: Reflections on Survival, Faith, and Grace and in The Blood That Never Failed: A Sacred Heart Testimony.

These are not martyrdom in the strict sense in which the Church uses that word.

The Church has always defined Christian martyrdom as giving one’s life for Christ because of hatred of the faith.

But I think there is still something martyr-like in the daily surrender that suffering sometimes asks of us.

The word martyr comes from the idea of witness.

And there are people all around us giving quiet witness every day.

Not by dying in a concentration camp.

But by loving while they hurt.

Sometimes We Wear Both at Once

The strange thing is that life rarely gives us one crown at a time.

A person grieving a child still has to wake up the next morning and make breakfast.

Someone undergoing chemotherapy may still have a spouse who needs comforting.

A caregiver can be utterly exhausted and still have someone depending on them.

Teachers can walk into school carrying a private grief that none of their students know anything about.

A person living with chronic illness can be suffering deeply and still somehow find the strength to ask someone else how they are doing.

That may be where the two crowns finally meet.

Suffering itself may be the red crown, while the decision to keep loving in the middle of it is the white one.

And maybe that is why Maximilian Kolbe’s story matters so much.

His martyrdom did not come out of nowhere.

When the moment came to give everything, he already knew how to give something.

He had been practicing for years.

The Crown in Front of Us

I do not think we need to pray for suffering.

Life is perfectly capable of supplying that without our help.

And I certainly do not think we need to romanticize pain. Some things simply hurt, losses remain losses, and wounds do not become beautiful just because we put religious language around them.

But perhaps on the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe we can pray for the grace to carry whatever crown is already in front of us.

Maybe today it is the white one.

The opportunity to be patient.

To apologize, keep a promise, and be kind to somebody who cannot repay us.

To do our work well and love our family.

And maybe today it is the red one.

The diagnosis, grief, fear or exhaustion.

The body that no longer does what it once did and the future that suddenly looks nothing like the one we planned.

We do not have to pretend to like those crowns.

I doubt Maximilian Kolbe thought starvation was beautiful.

Christian courage is not pretending suffering does not hurt.

It is refusing to let suffering have the last word.

And perhaps that is what I admire most about Maximilian.

Auschwitz was built to strip human beings of everything.

Their names, dignity, freedom, hope, and humanity.

Yet somehow, in the middle of that place, Maximilian Kolbe still found one thing the Nazis could not take from him.

The freedom to love.

They could imprison, starve, and kill him.

But they could not make him stop being Maximilian Kolbe.

They could not make him hate.

The red crown never destroyed the white one.

In the end, they became one.

So today I keep coming back to the image of that little boy standing before Mary.

Two crowns.

One white.

One red.

And the astonishing answer:

Both.

Most of us would probably never ask for both.

The truth is, we usually do not have to.

If we live long enough, love will ask something of us.

And suffering will too.

Perhaps our prayer, then, is not that God give us crowns.

Perhaps it is simply that when they arrive, he gives us enough grace to carry them.

Enough courage for today and enough compassion not to become bitter.

Enough strength to keep loving and eough faith to believe that even suffering cannot separate us from God.

And enough humility to recognize the little opportunities for holiness that are already sitting in front of us.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.

And when our own crowns become heavy, teach us how to carry them bravely and fervently to the end.