The Priest Who Took Another Man's Place

In July 1941, a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz. As punishment, the SS selected ten men from Block 14 to die by starvation in an underground bunker. When Franciszek Gajowniczek heard his number called, he cried out for his wife and children. From the ranks, a gaunt Polish priest stepped forward. Maximilian Kolbe, prisoner 16670, looked at the commandant and said, "I wish to take his place."

The guards were stunned. No one volunteered for the starvation bunker. Yet Kolbe walked calmly into that concrete tomb, and for two weeks he led the condemned men in hymns and prayer as they slowly died. Gajowniczek, meanwhile, walked back into the sunlight — a man who had been sentenced to death, now alive because someone righteous stood in his place.

Gajowniczek survived the war. He lived to be ninety-three. Every year until his death, he returned to Auschwitz to lay flowers at the wall where Kolbe had been taken. He spent fifty-three years testifying to one truth: "I was condemned. A man I barely knew died so I could live."

Peter writes that Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God. What Kolbe did for one man in one death camp, Christ did for all humanity on a Roman cross. The Righteous One stepped forward, took the sentence that belonged to us, and opened the way to life on the other side.