Auschwitz

Last week, the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp was commemorated in remembrance of the more than 1.1 million people who were murdered there by the Nazis during the Second World War.  The evils committed at Auschwitz must never be forgotten nor permitted to occur again.  

 
Auschwitz was actually a complex of camps located in the vicinity of the Polish city of Oswiecim.  The Main Camp at Oswiecim (Auschwitz I) and satellite camp at Monowitz (Auschwitz III) were concentration camps where people were imprisoned, mistreated, worked at forced labor and oftentimes murdered.  The Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II) Camp was designed and operated expressly for the industrialized murder of people. There people were killed in gas chambers and their bodies incinerated in mass crematoriums operated by other prisoners.  In addition, there were some 40 sub-camps affiliated with Auschwitz where people were worked to death.  It is estimated that at least 1.3 million people, predominantly Jews, were sent to the Auschwitz Camps and some 1.1 million were killed there, including 960,000 Jews.  The scale and sophistication of the evil barbarity committed by Nazi Germans and their accomplices at the Auschwitz Camps defies rationale comprehension.  [See the U.S. Holocaust Museum website for more information https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz?utm_source=website&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=  ]

 
“The horror of the extermination of millions of Jews and people of other faiths during those years can neither be forgotten nor denied,” said Pope Francis I prior to the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.  Back in 2016, Pope Francis I visited Auschwitz as did his predecessors Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 and Pope St. John Paul II in 1979.  Referring to the Nazis, Pope Benedict XVI said “By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.”

[See https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2025/documents/20250126-angelus.html  and https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/may/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060528_auschwitz-birkenau.html  

Even amidst such horrific evil, God rose up courageous individuals to perform acts of tremendous charity.  So many of these acts will never be known in this life.  

 
Two such individuals are well known to Catholics:  St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and St. Maximilian Kolbe.  Both perished at Auschwitz but live in Eternity with our most merciful Father. 

 
Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Germany in 1891 into a Jewish family.  She was highly educated and converted to Catholicism in January 1922.  St. Teresa of Avila’s autobiography was highly influential in her decision to become Catholic.  In 1933, Edith joined the Carmelite Order.  Her sister Rosa also converted to Catholicism and entered the Carmelite Order.  In June 1939, she offered her life to God for the salvation of the German people and for peace.  On 2 August 1942, she and her sister were arrested by the Gestapo.   Along with many other Jewish Christians, the two sisters were sent to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp in Poland.   They most likely were gassed there on 9 August 1942.

 
Raymond Kolbe was born in 1894 in Zdunska Wola, Poland.  He studied in seminary for the Conventual Franciscans, adopted the name Maximilian and took his solemn vows in November 1914.  The following year, he earned a Doctorate in Philosophy.  On 16 October 1917, Friar Maximilian established the Militia Immaculata to spread devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and was ordained as a priest the following April.    In September 1939, Nazi German and Soviet forces invaded and conquered Poland.  In February 1941, Father Maximilian was arrested by the German Gestapo and was transferred to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in May 1941.  At the end of July, the Camp Commandant ordered ten prisoners to be starved to death in retaliation for another prisoner’s escape.  Father Maximilian offered to take the place of Francis Gajowniczek, who had a family.  When he failed to succumb to starvation, the Nazis killed him with a lethal injection of acid on 14 August 1941.  His body was cremated.  

St. Teresa Benedicta and St. Maximilian Kolbe were just two of the Catholic martyrs of Auschwitz.  In her Catholic News Agency article 27 January 2025, Kristina Millare profiled them and some of the other Catholic martyrs including the Pallottine priest Blessed Józef Jankowski, Sister Maria Klemensa Staszewska of the Ursulines of the Roman Union, and the parish priest Blessed Boleslaw Strzelecki.   [See https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/261845/80-years-later-remembering-the-catholic-martyrs-killed-in-auschwitz-during-world-war-ii  ]  

 
With the Soviet Army advancing from the East, the German SS attempted to destroy the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria in late November 1944 and thus get rid of the physical evidence of their atrocities.   In mid-January 1945, the SS began evacuating the Auschwitz camps by forced marching their prisoners to other camps located farther west.  On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army found the Auschwitz camps and some 7,000 prisoners who were still there.  

 
As Catholic Christians, we know that no evil, even that as monstrous as Auschwitz, can triumph over God.  Evil cannot triumph --- not at Auschwitz, not in the killing fields of Cambodia, not in the abortion clinics, not at Ground Zero, and not at Golgotha.  Our hope is in Christ Jesus and that hope shall not be disappointed.  As Jesus tells us, “In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33).