Where did Maximilian Kolbe grow up and live?

📍Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim, Poland

1894 – 1941

“I was a Polish Franciscan friar who had established a community at Niepokalanów near Warsaw and built it into one of the largest Catholic monasteries in the world, with its own radio station and publishing house, before the war came and changed everything. When the Germans occupied Poland I sheltered thousands of refugees at Niepokalanów, including Jewish families, and I continued publishing materials that criticised the Nazi occupation. I was arrested in 1941 and sent to Auschwitz, assigned to the starvation bunker after a prisoner escaped and ten men were selected to die in reprisal. I stepped forward and asked to take the place of one of the condemned men — Franciszek Gajowniczek, who had a wife and children. The commandant allowed it. I survived for two weeks in the starvation bunker, leading the other men in prayer and song, and was finally killed by lethal injection on the 14th of August 1941.”

👍 LovedThe Franciscan community of Niepokalanów, which at its height housed nearly eight hundred friars and embodied a vision of religious life as active service to the world. The clarity that faith gave me about what mattered and what did not.

👎 DislikedThe Nazi occupation that destroyed everything we had built. The suffering of my fellow prisoners. The starvation bunker, which was everything that human beings should not do to each other — and which became, somehow, a place of prayer.

Map showing where Maximilian Kolbe lived — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim, Poland

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Maximilian Kolbe's home at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim, Poland

📍 Street view today

Sources: Treece, P. A Man for Others: Maximilian Kolbe, Saint of Auschwitz (1982), Harper & Row; Dewar, D. Saint of Auschwitz: The Story of Maximilian Kolbe (1982), Darton, Longman & Todd; Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial archives