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Maximilian Kolbe’s Triumph at Auschwitz
Providentially, one of the more sobering, numbing, and yet unifying films of recent years was just released during this time of a disturbing rise in antisemitism in America. The movie is about the Holocaust, and specifically about the horror house known as Auschwitz. It’s a film about a priest who brought a glimmer of light into that darkness for Christians and Jews alike, and even for atheists. His name was Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar who today is a saint. The film is Triumph of the Heart.
Unlike the outrageously secularized 2024 film about … Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), this saint’s heroic piety is not gutted for the approval of non-believers.
Triumph of the Heart is a powerful work, difficult to watch and even more difficult to review. As someone who has long known and written about Fr. Kolbe’s story, I think I can be of assistance in providing crucial, helpful background to those about to see the movie.
Maximilian Maria Kolbe was born on January 8, 1894. As a 12-year-old boy, Kolbe received a dramatic image. He had just had a bitter quarrel with his mother, a kind, devout woman who in exasperation asked what would become of him. The boy sought answers in a nearby church, where a heavenly mother — the Blessed Virgin Mary — appeared to him in a mystical vision. “What will become of me?” he asked her. The woman who had watched her only Son accept a crown of thorns before accepting a crown of glory held out two crowns to the boy. “She came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red,” said Kolbe. “She asked if I was willing to accept either of these crowns.” The white crown meant he would persevere in purity; the red crown meant he would become a martyr. Kolbe said he would accept them both.
Shortly thereafter, Kolbe became a Franciscan and entered seminary in Lwów, Poland. He completed his vows in 1914. He went to Rome where he earned doctorates in philosophy and theology from two of the eternal city’s most prestigious Pontifical universities.
Kolbe became a pioneer in the movement of Marian entrustment and consecration. In 1917, he organized the so-called “Militia Immaculata.” His militia would fight with prayer and words. Kolbe became very adept in the media technology of the day, harnessing new methods of communication, including the best available printing presses. He created a popular, influential publication called The Knight of the Immaculata, which he used to criticize the Nazi regime threatening the country.
Once the Nazis seized Poland, they wasted little time rounding up and imprisoning Kolbe as well as the nation’s millions of Jews. On February 17, 1941, well before even the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Kolbe was sent to a concentration camp. He became Prisoner #16670. He was singled out for special persecution and humiliation.
One day near the end of July 1941, one of the captives escaped Auschwitz. In response, the German commander ordered 10 other prisoners to be rounded up and starved to death. This was just one cruel method employed by the Nazis to deter anyone who dared to consider an escape.
One of them, a young father named Franciszek Gajowniczek, pleaded, “My wife! My children! I shall never see them again!” Kolbe stepped forward and announced that he was a priest and wanted to die in place of the young father. A priest serves in persona Christi, in the person of Christ. The Germans accepted the priest’s sacrifice of his body and blood — laying down his own life for the life of his friend. Kolbe and the others were dispatched to an underground cell aptly known as Death Block 13.
Over the next two weeks, Kolbe said Mass and led the others in prayers and hymns. After two weeks of complete deprivation of food and water, only Kolbe remained alive among the 10. The Nazi guards decided to finally rid themselves of the pesky priest. They brought in a lethal solution of carbolic acid.
Bruno Borgowiec was an eyewitness. “Immediately after the S.S. men with the executioner had left I returned to the cell,” he later remembered, “where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant.”
Kolbe had sealed a covenant he made years earlier as a boy. He donned the red crown of martyrdom the Blessed Mother had offered him. He would now receive a crown of glory, too.
Four decades later, on October 10, 1982, Maximilian Maria Kolbe would be sainted by a native son of Poland: Pope John Paul II, the first and only Polish pontiff, and himself a survivor of the Nazi occupation. There for the canonization was Franciszek Gajowniczek, the young father at Auschwitz who had been given a long extension of life by Kolbe, the so-called “Saint of Auschwitz.”
That’s the background, which is captured brilliantly but painfully in Triumph of the Heart. Regrettably, one element of my backdrop that isn’t carried through in the movie is Franciszek Gajowniczek’s appearance at Kolbe’s canonization, which I thought would be a beautiful ending, perhaps akin to the close of Saving Private Ryan. Unfortunately, the filmmakers left that thread out of the ending. They must have felt it was another moving part that would have kept the narrative not as tightly focused. Filmmakers make those hard choices.
That aside, viewers are spared nothing from inside that cell block. What they see is very hard to watch. It’s crushingly sad, even amid the spiritually uplifting moments and the promise of life and bliss eternal. The earthly suffering is so brutal that it seems like quite the defeat. But it’s the promise of a better existence beyond our harsh realm that constitutes the triumph of Kolbe and friends at Auschwitz. At the start of the film, when Kolbe offers himself in exchange for the condemned prisoner, the Nazi guard callously shrugs, “Very well, sir. You have proved nothing.” But in fact, he proved everything. He proved that this life is a proving ground for the next. Ultimately, our place and goal is not this world but the next.
To be sure, it doesn’t feel that way amid those bitter powers of the present darkness. But we fix our gaze not on the sufferings of this world but our resurrection to the glories of the next. And that was the triumph at Auschwitz. It was captured movingly and repeatedly by the filmmakers as with each prisoner’s earthly expiration they subtly showed the seemingly defeated victim alive again, alighted, the soul ready to ascend to its heavenly destination.
The movie was filmed on location in Lodz, Poland. The writer and director is Anthony D’Ambrosio and the company is Sherwood Fellows. It isn’t a cast of big names, but the actors provide impressive performances.
The filmmakers are Catholic, and they rightly retain the Catholic-Christian spirituality if not theology that’s the bedrock of the story and of Kolbe’s life and witness. Unlike the outrageously secularized 2024 film about the wonderful Italian-American saint, Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), this saint’s heroic piety is not gutted for the approval of non-believers. (READ MORE from Paul Kengor: Gutting Jesus: Feminist Cabrini, Secular Saint) Catholics will appreciate that Kolbe is kept unapologetically Catholic by the makers of this movie.
At the same time, non-Catholics will appreciate and applaud that this film honors their faiths, too. The Jewish characters are kept Jewish. One of the first to perish is a Jewish professor of the Torah who amid the frowns musters a smile and tells Kolbe that he hadn’t thought there was an ounce of good left in the rotten world until he saw the priest offer himself for the other prisoner. “You have chutzpah, my friend!” he tells Kolbe.
Near the end of the film, the priest pulverizes a sharp-pointed rock that the Nazi guards had left for the prisoners to slice their wrists and commit suicide. He creates ashes from the rock and makes a Lent-like sign of the cross on the foreheads of each cellmate. When he comes to the remaining Jewish man, the man offers not his head but his hand in a firm shake of faithful solidarity. The filmmakers did not insist on the Catholic priest converting every Jew in that room. They were faithful to the other faiths and the historical truth of what happened.
Throughout the film, the prisoners show a healthy respect for one another’s faith and the knowledge that they’re in this pit together, all sides battling the same evil foe. They even find a way to laugh about the situation, with the communist prisoner at one point remarking, “A communist, a Catholic, and a Jew—sounds like the beginning of a joke.” They bond nonetheless. They know that the beast at the door is Nazism, a friend of none of the men, an ally only to the sons of darkness. At one point, the atheist prisoner confesses to Fr. Kolbe that he doesn’t believe in Heaven but he does believe in Hell.
Indeed, by the point, how could he not? He was witnessing Hell. Maybe he wasn’t yet sure that God existed, but he sure as Hell was sure that the Devil existed. That much was made clear to all in Death Block 13.
The film is ecumenical in the best way. It isn’t a display of some namby-pamby, sappy, silly, kumbaya, spineless ecumenism. And at this moment in America, when Jews and Christians need to come together to once again fight common foes, that’s a timely message and mission.
After the film ends, the writer/director appears on camera with an anguished but inspired plea to prayer and to remember Kolbe and his cause. D’Ambrosio also makes a plea for donations to filmmakers like him and others who struggle terribly to get their projects financed. That’s a wish often shared at The American Spectator by writers like our Lou Aguilar and yours truly. At our recent annual gala, I closed my Q&A with filmmaker Robert Orlando with a plea to benefactors big and small to support religious and conservative filmmakers who don’t have the luxury of the Hollywood money machine behind them.
(Orlando’s new documentary film on the history of The American Spectator will premiere in Washington, DC on December 4. Please join us and click here to register. To reserve your seat, please RSVP to Morgan Weiner, Development Assistant, at weinerm@spectator.org.)
I share that only to underscore that I can relate to D’Ambrosio’s pain. But this review is not about other movies right now. For this moment, go and see or just plain support D’Ambrosio’s film on Maximilian Kolbe. Remarkable works like this deserve your support, especially at this time of badly needed unity among Christians and Jews alike.
READ MORE from Paul Kengor:
The Mamdani Model: More Socialist Mayors to Come
New Yorkers Elect ANOTHER Commie Mayor
Hammering a Higher Vision for Higher Education: The College of St. Joseph the Worker
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