Prisoner Number 16670
In March of 1995, a ninety-three-year-old man died in a small town in Poland. His name was Francis Gajowniczek. The death of an elderly man might not strike us as significant, but the fact that he lived so long was due to the death of another man, who died in his place. Gajowniczek had been a soldier in the Polish army and was captured by the advancing Nazi troops when World War Two began with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. He was sent to Auschwitz, a newly constructed Labor Camp not far from Krakow, where he was prisoner number 5659. That’s when prisoner number 16670 steps into the story.
At least 1.5 million Jews perished in Auschwitz and its neighboring camp, Birkenau. The evidence indicates many more than that died. Hundreds of thousands of others were murdered under the terrifying efficiency of these Nazi death and labor camps. Among these were Polish intellectuals feared by the ascendant Nazi regime, including the Catholic Franciscan leader Fr. Maximillian Kolbe.
This man - prisoner number 16670 - was standing with the other prisoners in roll call when the camp commander demanded that ten men be placed in a starvation death cell as punishment for the disappearance of three prisoners from the camp. One of those selected for death was Gajownicek. When chosen, he began to cry out for mercy, speaking of his wife and children and pleading to be spared. Hearing his cries, Fr. Kolbe stepped forward and offered to take Gajownicek’s place among the condemned; the commandant accepted his offer.
Very little can prepare a person for the horror of Auschwitz. I’ve walked around the nightmarish camp, the ground zero of evil in modern history. I’ve been in the dark corridors of the basement cell block and stared into the cell where Kolbe wasted away without food and water, finally put to death by lethal injection. I’ve seen the dimly burning candle that stands in that cell to commemorate his sacrifice so another could live. Kolbe’s willingness to sacrifice his life for another prisoner made him, in John Paul the Second’s words, a ‘martyr to charity’.
One does not need to be a Roman Catholic to recognize in Fr Kolbe’s sacrifice of self for another an embodiment of the loving death of Jesus on our behalf and an example of what it means to love our neighbor. Gajownicek survived the war and returned to his wife, spending his years telling others of the man who died so he could live. We do this as well, and we do it most effectively, when we tell it in deeds of sacrificial mercy that match our words of grace, demonstrating the matchless love of Christ who suffered in our place on the cross.
As we prepare today for Easter celebrations, let us make certain we don’t hurry past the agony of the cross, obscuring it from our view with a rolled-away stone. As Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 15:1ff, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus are a singular event, a triptych of grace that displays the unified mercy of the Triune God who saves us across three panels. Contemplating the suffering of Jesus on our behalf will only deepen our joy and wonder at his resurrection and serve as a reminder of what it means to rise daily by dying daily to sin and self, living to love God supremely and our neighbors as ourselves.