| When
I entered the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I received Identification
Card #2855. For the next four hours I became Malvin Katz Fried,
a real Hungarian Jewish woman about my own age during the Holocaust.
The industrial steel elevator I took
to start my tour on the fourth floor immediately seemed as confining
as the railroad boxcars that carried so many Jews to their deaths.
Then as I threaded my way inexorably downward, through the history
the displays recount, I lived Malvin's times and her personal
story.
Name: Malvin Katz Fried
Date of Birth: 1893
Place of Birth: Buj, Hungary
Malvin and her eight brothers and
sisters were born to religious Jewish parents in a small town
in northeastern Hungary. The family later moved to another village,
where Malvin's father ran a general store. The Katz family lived
in a sprawling farmhouse with a large garden and fruit orchards.
Malvin married Sandor Fried, the brother of her sister Sadie's
husband.
A unanimous act of Congress authorized
a U.S. Holocaust memorial in 1980, following the lead of other
countries. Members of the President's Commission on the Holocaust
and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council were convinced of the
truism that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Now there are two generations who never lived through the Second
World War. A frightening trend is to deny that the Holocaust ever
took place or at least to downplay its effects, points out Edward
T. Linenthal, professor of religious studies at the University
of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and author of Preserving Memory: The Struggle
to Create America's Holocaust Museum.
And so it was decided that the best
way to preserve the memory would be with artifacts, documentation,
recorded oral histories, photographs and displays listing the
historical facts. This memorial would be a museum to inform as
well as remind.
The museum was born out of politics--President
Jimmy Carter's desire to establish better relations with Jews
in the wake of reactions to his comments about the need for a
Palestinian
homeland. It was refined under intense political wrangling and
national soul-searching about whether the Holocaust was principally
a Jewish event or one with universal significance.
This museum would also concentrate
on the good and bad aspects of American involvement in the Holocaust:
what America might have done to avoid or lessen the tragedy but
didn't do, the U.S. Army's liberation of some of the camps, American
resettlement efforts and our relationship with the state of Israel.
A 1.9-acre site near the Washington
Monument was given by the federal government. The museum itself
was built with private donations and dedicated April 22, 1993.
It has become the third most-visited tourist destination in Washington,
right after the White House and the Vietnam Wall. According to
a guard, more than half of those going through the museum are
non-Jews.
A Brilliant Design
The neoclassical structure for this
state-of-the-art museum was designed by James Ingo Freed, a principal
with the firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and a Jew who had
fled Germany in 1939 at the age of nine. He admits, in an interview
with Smithsonian magazine (April 1993), that the design
almost defeated him. How could he ask casual tourists to "shift
abruptly 50 years into the past, to confront an ugly world they
might know little about, nor care to have their children see"?
Then he visited Auschwitz, saw what is left of the ovens and "found
his shoes flecked with bits of human bones."
Freed says, "I wanted to convey
the feeling of constantly being watched, of things closing in.
I was thinking of the Warsaw ghetto. The bridges that the Jews
had to cross over to get from one part of the ghetto to another,
so they wouldn't contaminate others. I wanted the feeling of a
procession. Of choices: either/or. Selections. The long lulls
and sudden bumps forward, the steps to death."
This is what Freed achieved by his
design, considered brilliant by museum makers and architects.
The years march down to the Hall of Remembrance, a six-sided memorial
where visitors can meditate on what they have just seen.
This Hall of Remembrance is a point
of contention, however. Many psychologists say the museum should
have ended with a room for discussion rather than silence because
so many visitors are extremely affected by the museum and should
have an opportunity to talk that out.
The
Ugliness of Anti-Semitism
In the rising steel elevator, the tour
begins with a video of a camp liberator from the U.S. Army describing
what he witnessed in 1945. Then the doors open on a large wall
photo of a G.I. entering a camp. I step out onto the fourth floor
where the exhibits trace Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933
and the increasing Nazi restrictions on the Jews: no public worship,
no businesses that sold outside the Jewish community, no home
ownership, registration for armbands and stars of David, frozen
bank accounts, barring Jews from trolleys...
The pseudo-sciences of physiognomy
and eugenics "proved" the Jews were not human and Aryans
were the "superior" race. It was this teaching--that
Jews are different, nonhuman and undesirable--coupled with pernicious,
pervasive anti-Semitism, that allowed all the horror of the slave-labor
camps and the systemic extermination of six million Jews.
A movie on anti-Semitism relates how
religious prejudice funneled into the political mix of the Third
Reich. Jesus was a Jew and the Last Supper was a Passover meal,
but Christians became fixated on the notion that the Jews were
the killers of Christ. (It was not until Vatican II's Nostra
Aetate [Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian
Religions, 1965] that the Catholic Church made it clear that
Jews were not responsible for killing Jesus. Not until 1994 did
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America officially denounce
Martin Luther's vile writings about the Jews.) The movie reminds
viewers that Hitler was baptized a Catholic. The message is clear:
Religious prejudice leads straight to the Holocaust.
A critical exhibition gives information
about non-Jewish groups also targeted by the Nazis: gypsies (Roma),
Poles, political dissidents including Communists, Soviet prisoners
of war, handicapped people, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and
Freemasons.
At the end of this 1933-39 part of
the museum, I read of Malvin during the years I have just passed
through:
My oldest sister, Sadie, who emigrated
to the United States years ago, has come home for a visit. Her
two children love helping my mother gather fruit in the orchards.
On their trip over, Sadie stopped in Hamburg and says she saw
Nazis marching in the streets. She's afraid, but we've told her
not to worry: It all seems so far away.
Photos From a Village Long Gone
A bridge spans the concourse far below.
On glass walls are etched the names of 5,000 European towns, villages
and shtetls (Jewish communities) that were totally destroyed
by the Nazis.
This leads to the moral heart of the
museum: three stories of photographs taken over 50 years in Ejszyszki,
one such shtetl in Lithuania. The museum was redesigned to accommodate
this collection, but oh, how powerful! Here the six million Jews
have faces and histories and culture. They are pictured at weddings
and family reunions, graduations and bar mitzvahs. There are portraits
of young women and men full of hope, grandfathers linked with
grandsons--a profusion of Jewish life now cut short.
Of the 4,000 Jews in Ejszyszki, only
29 Jews survived. Most were killed by the Einsatzgruppen
(German killing squad) and Lithuanian collaborators on September
25-26, 1941. Among the survivors was four-year-old Yaffa Sonenson
and some of her family, but in their hiding place one of her baby
brothers was accidentally smothered to death to prevent his cries
from giving them away. In 1944 Yaffa's mother and another brother
were killed. Yaffa remembers how her mother "protected us
with her body....I was covered in blood, and they left."
Then her father was arrested by the Russians and sent to Siberia;
years later he emigrated to Israel. Yaffa assumed the identity
of an uncle's murdered daughter and escaped with her uncle to
Israel. She was reunited with her surviving brother and in 1954
moved to the United States.
Using videos, oral histories and radio recordings, artifacts and documentation, this is a narrative museum which tells the story of the Holocaust's victims, perpetrators and bystanders.
Yaffa, a teacher at Brooklyn College,
was named a member of the U.S. Holocaust Commission in 1979 and
decided to document her hometown: "I wanted to rescue this
one town from oblivion." She and her husband, David
Eliach, spent a decade acquiring the 6,000 photographs from
archaeological excavations and "survivor photos" sent
to relatives overseas or carried by emigrants. In the end, these
moving photos have found a spectacular home at the museum.
The
'Showers' of Auschwitz
After descending the stairs to the
third floor, visitors encounter a German railroad car, loaned
by the Polish government and thought to have delivered Jews and
others to the death camps. (The car was hoisted into the building
during its construction.) The wooden railroad platform and the
piles of luggage confiscated at this point are reminders that
when the boxcars came into the concentration camps this was a
point of selection: Here camp officers decided who would live
for the moment and who would die immediately. Most of those whose
possessions were confiscated here were marched directly to gas
chambers disguised as showers.
Then museum visitors pass under a re-creation of the famous, ironic
sign from Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Brings
Freedom") and there is part of an actual barracks from Birkenau.
Stone blocks from the Mauthausen quarry testify to how inmates
were forced to work and sometimes pushed to their deaths by SS
(Schutzstaffel) guards. Polish artist Mieczyslaw
Stobierski's sculpture with its hundreds of plaster figures shows
how bodies were sent to the "showers," gassed and cremated
in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Behind barricades high enough that children cannot see are images
and artifacts documenting the horrific, and in some cases useless,
medical experiments carried out on Jewish prisoners. (Generally,
no children below ninth grade should visit without an adult.)
In a side room are heard actors reading the words of survivors
about what life was like in the camps. A mound of 4,000 shoes
left behind at Majdanek bears mute witness to those gassed there.
The shoes were to be recycled to German families.
Those
Who Resisted
One story below, the visitor must pass
again through the Eliach collection of photos. Now the cumulative
effect of the "Tower of Photos" is even more impressive,
and sadder.
I catch up with Malvin during the years
1940-44. Her situation is becoming more desperate:
Four weeks ago, on March 19, 1944,
German forces occupied Hungary. Here in Myirbator, where I moved
after my marriage, all of us Jewish citizens have been forced
to abandon our homes and most of our belongings. We've spent the
last few days crowded into the local synagogue. The rough Hungarian
police have searched us and stolen our remaining money and jewelry.
Now they've told us that we're to be moved to a ghetto in the
county seat. Then what will happen to us?
On this second floor is the story of
the Jews who fought back. A fishing boat recalls how Danes carried
Jews to safety in Sweden.
A long wall down the center of the
room lists on both sides those who helped Jews, given by country,
with certain key individuals singled out. Among these are Father
Ruffino Niccaci, the Franciscan who ran the Assisi underground
and protected 280 Jews; Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat
who provided papers to many escaping Hungarian Jews and disappeared
into Siberia after the war (the alleyway beside the museum is
named for him); Father Marie Benoit, a Capuchin friar in Marseilles,
France, who helped 4,000 Jewish refugees escape into Switzerland
and Spain, and proposed a plan to Pope Pius XII of how more Jews
could have been helped; Marie-Rose Gineste from Montauban, France,
a Catholic laywoman who found hiding places for Jews by convincing
local convents to take in whole families and getting them forged
baptismal papers and identity cards; the Polish organization Zegota,
which was organized to save Jews and whose membership included
many Catholics.
More oral histories chronicle both liberators and survivors. A
small exhibit recalls the resettlement of Jewish survivors in
the United States and Israel. And visitors can use earphones to
hear actual proceedings from the Nuremburg trials of key Nazis
arrested for war crimes.
At the end of the second floor I read in the last page of my identity
card about Malvin's fate:
Malvin and her husband, Sandor,
were among 435,000 Hungarian Jews deported in the early summer
of 1944 to Auschwitz. Malvin and her husband perished there.
Remember
the Children
In the museum one special exhibit called
"Daniel's Story: Remember the Children" is intended
specifically for children. It recreates the world of a fictional
Jewish boy of 14 who might have lived in Frankfurt before the
war. He and his family are forced from their home and sent to
the Lodz Ghetto and then to Auschwitz. The exhibit emphasizes
the ordinariness of his life before the war and the way he and
his father lived at Auschwitz.
What is remarkable about the exhibit
is that it includes some letters from children who saw the exhibit
early and wrote to Daniel, saying things like, "Your story
is so touching. It made me realize that it was real and could
happen to us." A Native American child points out that the
same things happened to his people.
What
I Learned
Before I went, I dreaded the prospect
of going to the Holocaust Museum. I have read a lot about the
Holocaust in history books and novels; I have seen movies like
Exodus and Schindler's List, and television shows
and miniseries like The Holocaust and Shoah. In
many ways my imagination is stronger than reality, and I had imagined
worse. This is not to say the museum trivializes the harsh reality
of what happened or that it isn't shocking to those unfamiliar
with the facts. But the process of making an orderly museum--selecting
what will be shown, what will be said, and presenting it tastefully--organizes a reality that at its base
defies logic.
The museum did not teach me anything I had not known beforehand.
It's not meant to; it's meant to elicit an emotional response,
and that it does. It immerses visitors in the experience
of the Holocaust.
The museum presents clearly the events of Nazi Germany regarding
its plan to exterminate the Jews as one unbroken line that starts
from anti-Semitism and racism.
One always wonders, "What would I have done in this situation?"
If I were a Jew, how would I have died or survived? As a Christian,
would I have helped in some way? Would I have been a victim, a
perpetrator or a not-so-innocent bystander? This museum provides no answers, but many more questions.
Religiously, the Holocaust museum provokes two dilemmas. For Jews,
there is the problem of a God who apparently did not keep his
covenant with his Chosen People, and allowed two thirds of European
Jewry to be killed. For Christians, the Holocaust alters fundamentally
our relationship with Jews.
Father John Pawlikowski, O.S.M., a longtime Holocaust Council
member who teaches social ethics at The Catholic Theological Union
in Chicago, was among those insistent that the story of both Christian
complicity and resistance be told in the museum. He fears that
the story is still not told forcefully enough. Yet Pawlikowski
was careful to advise that guilt not be ladled out indiscriminately.
And Martin Smith, an early director of the museum's permanent
exhibition, still objects to the prominent display of a Christian
rescue of Jews because he believes, "[I]t was much more likely
that you would be saved by a Communist or a socialist than a Christian."
And there is still the problem of whether the Holocaust is a uniquely
Jewish event. Granted, six million Jews died, but so did five
million others. The museum started out to try to keep certain
distinctions: Jews were Holocaust victims, others were victims
of Nazi terror; Jews were exterminated, others were murdered.
But the lines do blur. According to Linenthal, "The struggle
for ownership of the Holocaust memory took place on a fundamentally
religious level." Pawlikowski would grant the "unique
dimensions" of the Jewish experience, but argued rightly
that other victims needed to be included.
This battle for who will own the Holocaust memory also extends
into whether this was a one-time event or whether there are lessons
to be learned here regarding other genocides and ethnic wars and
race and hate crimes. Is not the story of Cambodia's "killing
fields," of Rwanda's battling tribes, of the Bosnian conflict,
of the burning of black and interracial churches in the American
South--30-plus in the past year and a half--part of the same legacy
of hate and violence as the Holocaust? The Holocaust was a particular
series of crimes, but it has come to stand for Evil Incarnate.
To the extent that other ethnic and racial crimes are evil, they
are related.
Hall
of Remembrance
As I come to the end of the museum,
I sit in the cold hexagonal-shaped Hall of Remembrance on the
first floor and ponder the nature of evil. But is that why I am
here?
Around me are words from the Hebrew
Scriptures that emphasize the value of remembering: "Only
guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget
the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart
all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your
children and to your children's children" (Deuteronomy 4:9).
In the end I light a candle in front
of the Auschwitz memorial for Malvin Katz Fried and all those
who died in the Holocaust. The words on the cover of Malvin's
identity card sum it up for me: "For the dead and
the living we must bear witness."
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is located at 100 Raoul
Wallenberg Place, S.W. (15th Street and Independence Avenue),
Washington, DC 20024-2150 (phone
202-488-0400). Admission is free but tickets are required for
the permanent exhibition. Timed tickets are available in advance
for a small fee through ProTix (phone 800-400-9373).
Barbara Beckwith is the managing
editor of St.
Anthony Messenger and a graduate of Marquette University's
College of Journalism. She grew up in Skokie, Illinois, where
many survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and other Jews
settled after the Second World War. She remembers women in the
local five-and-dime reaching for items and exposing the numbers
that had been tattooed on their forearms in the camps.
Auschwitz: 'It's
Amazing That a Bird Can Sing Here'
By Barbara
Beckwith
"Be prepared: You'll be walking
in the ashes of the dead," a colleague from the United States
reminded me the night before we were to go to Auschwitz. When
the chimneys of the crematoria were blown up by the retreating
Nazis, they were so filled with human ashes that human remains
coated the fields for miles around.
Three months after I visited the U.S.
Holocaust Museum, I had the opportunity to find out how truthful
its presentation is, and to consider the Holocaust from the perspectives
of people from all over the world. As part of an International
Catholic Union of the Press (UCIP) meeting in April in Krakow,
Poland, about 30 of us journalists and editors made the pilgrimage
to Oswiecim, which was given the German name of Auschwitz
after the 1939 fall of Poland to the Nazis.
Auschwitz began as a concentration
camp in 1940 for Polish political prisoners. Then the Nazis began
to deport to the camp people from all the countries they conquered,
mainly Jews, but also Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, Czechs,
Slavs and others. The site was selected because of the convenient
rail lines with spurs coming directly into the camp. In 1941 a
second camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was built a mile away. Mass
killing began in 1942. The elaborate complex of gas chambers and
crematoria with giant smokestacks was actually at Birkenau. In
1943 Auschwitz III was established at German chemical plants,
steelworks, mines and factories where the prisoners could provide
cheap labor.
One and a half million people were
probably put to death at the Auschwitz camps, although this number
is hard to document. By the end of the war people were no longer
being registered, photographed or tattooed, but sent, nameless,
directly to their deaths. At its largest in 1942 Auschwitz I housed
20,000 people; by 1943 Auschwitz II-Birkenau housed 100,000. Nearly
all of those not killed immediately died from hunger, execution,
hard labor, punishments and the appalling sanitary conditions.
A
Prison Inside
a Concentration Camp
We toured the brick buildings of
Auschwitz, walked under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign beside
the rail line and barbed wire, saw the building where hideous
medical experiments involving sterilization were performed, and
stood in the first gas chambers where it was calculated how much
Zyklon B and how much time was needed to kill so many people in
so much space.
All personal effects brought to the
camp were confiscated by the SS to be recycled to German families.
We saw Jewish prayer shawls, toothbrushes, shaving brushes and
mugs, artificial limbs and spectacles. The shoes left by dead
prisoners, shoes that looked as if their owners would return momentarily
but never came back after their "showers," affected
me more than I can say. A woman journalist from Malaysia said
the hair covered with dust (and human ashes) got to her. The hair
shaved from the dead and cut from those selected for work was
made into blankets and haircloth (a graphic reminder of practicality
gone mad). Our Polish guide looked at the two of us women and
said she had decided not to show us the stacks of baby carriages;
we thanked her. On display is only a fraction of what the camp's
storehouses once contained; as the Nazis fled the camp, they blew
up 30 warehouses of such items.
We saw Block 11, the infamous Death
Block, which the guide described as "a prison inside a concentration
camp inside occupied Poland." At the "Wall of Death"
the SS shot thousands of prisoners. In the courtyard prisoners
were flogged or hanged using a stake through their arms bent behind
their backs. The wall nowadays is covered with flowers; while
we were there, a group of Polish schoolchildren processed in singing
and carrying more flowers. Inside Block 11 we saw "standing
cells" where four men were corralled in a 3' x 3' cubicle
and made to hold one another up until all were dead; another American
called this the worst thing he has ever seen.
In the assembly square all prisoners
had to turn out for roll call, the living carrying the dead, for
the sake of accurate German counts.
The gallows are still in place in back
where the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess, was hanged after the camp
was liberated by the Soviet Army.
Birkenau
Gas Chambers Are Rubble
"It's amazing that a bird can
sing here," a Canadian colleague said when we heard chirping
while walking around Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Here rail spurs lead
right in to the point of selection. To the right were the gas
chambers and crematoria; to the left, the barracks. Usually, the
prisoners had had an awful ride, crammed like cattle into closed
boxcars, often without food or water for seven or even 10 days.
Birkenau still has the wooden barracks
in the back, and only brick chimneys in the front. (Desperate
Poles after the war raided the camp for building and burning materials.)
Many barracks were made from converted stables, with three-tiered
berths for sleeping. Our guide said that one woman survivor was
surprised to discover that there had been latrines in back; during
the two years she was there she never knew that.
(Here at Birkenau Anne Frank and her
sister Margot were confined after being hidden in the Amsterdam
attic apartment of their father's company and before being sent
to Bergen-Belsen camp where they died. It is Frank's famous diary
that introduces most young people to the Holocaust.)
The gas chambers and crematoria were
blown up by the retreating
SS in 1945 in an attempt to conceal what they had done. The concrete
chunks and twisted metal pieces are preserved.
'We
Are All Victims, All Perpetrators'
Amid the crematoria ruins, at the end
of the railway lines that were for so many literally "the
end of the line," is the modernistic International Monument
to the Victims of Auschwitz, dedicated in 1967. It was here that
our group held a prayer service. Father Owen Campion, associate
publisher of Our Sunday Visitor and UCIP's ecclesiastical
adviser, reminded the journalists from many countries that we
are all victims and all perpetrators.
Our German colleagues, some of whom had themselves resisted the
Nazis or had family who had, were uncharacteristically subdued.
The international president, Dr. Gunther Mees from Muenster, remarked
when he saw young people picnicking on the lawn in front of the
Auschwitz visitors' center that he feared they will come to treat
Auschwitz as commonplace and the Holocaust as trivial. They are
"distancing themselves" from what happened here even
as they become more familiar with it.
A Jesuit priest from Pakistan wondered aloud how it is that these
things still keep happening throughout the world. He mentioned
a new finding of bones and skulls in Cambodia that indicates another
mass murder by the Khmer Rouge.
Our Polish guide, who normally works in the public relations office
for the Auschwitz State Museum, said she cannot give these tours
more than once a month. How she can do them at all is a testimony
to the human struggle to understand and remember.
Franciscan
Maximilian Kolbe
Auschwitz
Prisoner
#16670
By Carol Ann Morrow
Hitler's hate list reached beyond the
Jews. The Nazis also targeted Poland's intellectual community.
When World War II began, Poland had 10,217 Catholic priests. Over
one in three--a total of 3,646--were arrested and held in concentration
camps. Two thirds of those died there. Many of these priests were
heroes; one is now a canonized saint.
Maximilian Kolbe, a Conventual Franciscan
friar, was an intense, creative missionary who saw publishing
as a tool for preaching the gospel to the whole world. He begged
the money to begin a publication dedicated to Mary. Five years
later, he begged a printing press, then land near Warsaw for a
publishing complex. Called Niepokalanow (the City of the Immaculate),
the property became home to Franciscan friars and seminarians
who lived frugally, prayed much, and wrote, printed and distributed
a national daily with a circulation of 400,000. He began a similar
enterprise in Japan. Anti-Semitic articles appeared in Kolbe's
Polish daily, though Brother Hieronim later testified that Kolbe
chastised those responsible for such pieces.
In 1941 Kolbe was arrested and, after
several months in another camp, was moved to Auschwitz. Priests
received especially poor treatment in a place where meanness was
already the norm. Yet 48-year-old Kolbe never concealed his priesthood,
hearing confessions, sharing his rations, never complaining. According
to biographer Boniface Hanley, O.F.M., he told fellow prisoner
Joseph Stemler, "Hatred is not creative."
Kolbe seized every creative chance
to love. The imminent punishment of Franciszek Gojowniczek inspired
his final heroism. In a St. Anthony Messenger interview
with 93-year-old Gojowniczek in January 1995, the former Polish
sergeant recalled his pivotal encounter with the priest.
When any prisoner escaped, all prisoners
in the same block were subject to reprisals. Gojowniczek, one
of 10 randomly picked for starvation, cried out, "My wife
and children!" Kolbe stepped forward. "I am a Catholic
priest," he said calmly. "I want to die for that man.
I am old; he has a wife and children." Startled, the SS officer
agreed.
Kolbe survived two weeks without food,
only to be martyred by lethal injection. On August 15, 1941, the
Feast of the Assumption, the body of Maximilian Maria Kolbe, Mary's
champion, was incinerated.
Gojowniczek survived Auschwitz. Over time, his skull was fractured,
his ribs cracked, his teeth knocked out and he contracted typhoid,
but he lived. At 93, he said, "God gives me my time so that
I can still say some things--and in an hour I may be gone!"
He died in Poland just two months after this interview.
Gojowniczek had plunged into depression after Kolbe's death, feeling
unworthy to be saved at the cost of a holy man's life. A fellow
prisoner chided Gojowniczek, "Take hold of yourself! Is the
priest to die for nothing?" The survivor shook off his depression.
Ultimately, his testimony was key to the Vatican's recognition
of Kolbe's sanctity.
In his final trip to the United States, Gojowniczek seemed small
and pale, his hair white, thinning and a bit rumpled. Yet the
ex-prisoner moved with dignity, assisted by his wife, Janina.
During the interview, he expressed his dismay that U.S. citizens
knew so little of the war, of the camps and of Kolbe.
Yet Franciszek Gojowniczek died peacefully, confident that he
too had given his life. "I thirst for you to know" of
Kolbe's heroism, he told St. Anthony Messenger. He had
traveled much, including five trips to the United States, to testify
to his rescue by the Franciscan saint of Auschwitz. According
to Gojowniczek, "Maximilian Kolbe
didn't just give his life for me, he gave it for the world!"
|
A Brilliant Design
