What do these quotes mean to you and why? Can I describe how Christian’s beliefs shape lives? • What did we say that a modern day witness was? • Can you name any witnesses, either modern, or from the time of Jesus? • How can YOU be a modern day witness? Who is this man? If you don’t recognise him, look at the pictures on the next few slides. What clues can you find which tells us more information about him?

• Who do you think he was? What evidence have you found? • Where do you think he spent some time? What evidence have you found? • What do you think happened to him, and why? • Feast Day: August 14 • Born: 1894 • Died: 1941

• Raymond Kolbe was born in . When he was just a teenager, he joined the Franciscan order and took the name Maximilian. Maximilian loved his work and enjoyed studying to become a priest, and he especially loved the Blessed Mother.

• Before he became a priest, he started the Militia of Mary Immaculate or the Immaculata Movement devoted to Our Lady.

• Then when he took his vows to become a priest he added "Mary" to his name. Father Maximilian Mary knew that the world which was so full of sin, needed their Heavenly Mother to guide and protect them. • He started a magazine called "The Knight of the Immaculata" so that more people would know about Mother Mary. He and his Franciscan priests published two monthly newsletters that were sent to people around the world.

• The Mother of God blessed Father Maximilian's work. He built a large center in Poland. This center was called "City of the Immaculate."

• In about fifteen years, a large community of eight hundred lived there and worked hard to make the love of Mary known. Father Kolbe also started another City of the Immaculate in Nagasaki, Japan and yet another one in India. During the second world war, the Nazis were rounding up Jewish people and taking them off to concentration camps. Here they made them work, starved them, tortured them and eventually killed them.

Kolbe used his Church to shelter 2000 Jews from the Nazis and ran his own pirate radio station speaking out against the Nazis. On 17 February 1941 he was arrested by the German Secret Police and sent to a concentration camp - Auschwitz as prisoner #16670. In July 1941, a man from Kolbe's barracks vanished. The Nazi camp commander picked 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 13 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts. The man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine. One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, "My poor wife! My poor children! What will they do?" Kolbe offered himself instead. "I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children." During the time in the cell Kolbe led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. He encouraged others that they would soon be with Mary in heaven.

Each time the guards checked on him he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered, while the others lay moaning and complaining, on the ground around him. He was killed with an injection of carbolic acid. Some who were present at the injection say that he raised his left arm and calmly waited for the injection. was canonized (declared a Saint) by Pope John Paul II on 10 October 1982 in the presence of Franciszek Gajowniczek and his family.

1979 Pope John Paul II lays Franciszek Gajowniczek died flowers in the cell where in 1995 in Poland aged 95 – and Father Kolbe was murdered. 53 years after Kolbe had saved him. Maximilian Kolbe is one of the ten 20th Century Martyrs depicted in statues above the great West Door of Westminster Abbey London.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe: pray for us. “I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.” In your tables, discuss… • What do you think of Fr Kolbe and why? • What would you find challenging about his missions? • Why did he think his actions were necessary? • What inspired Fr Kolbe to think of others first? • How are you a witness in your local area? • How does your local chosen charity witness to care for others? • What can you do as a school, class or individual to witness to God’s love? Tasks • Write a report on how you are a living witness at school with others, at home with family and friends and individually. Describe your actions and give reasons why you do them. Say how your actions are shaping your life and others around you. Identify similarities and differences to other witnesses because of what you believe as a Christian. Reflection

• Now draw a heart like this:

• Underneath, write how being a modern day witness has shaped your life. How does it makes you feel?