by Currents Staff
A memorial was held August 14 at Auschwitz to honor St. Maximilian Kolbe who was martyred during the Holocaust. The Franciscan friar volunteered to die in place of another prisoner in the notorious Nazi death camp.
Hundreds attended the memorial including pilgrims from a center and parish named for the Polish martyr. During the memorial flowers were laid at the place of St. Kolbe’s murder in the starvation cell of Block 11. St. Kolbe was killed with a phenol injection.
The prisoner who was saved by St. Kolbe survived Auschwitz and died in 1995. St. Kolbe was canonized in 1982 by Pope St. John Paul II.