Word: gajowniczek
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...July 1941, a commandant at Auschwitz arbitrarily selected ten men to be starved to death in reprisal for the escape of one inmate. Francizek Gajowniczek, one of the ten, cried out for his wife and two children. Father Kolbe, 47, a political prisoner, offered to take Gajowniczek's place. Consigned to a basement cell, Kolbe survived about two weeks without food or water, consoling his fellow victims with prayers, until a prison guard finally killed him with an injection...
...Peter's Square was attended by 150,000 worshipers, among them 5,000 Catholics who came from Poland legally and hundreds of others who surreptitiously slipped out of that troubled country. After the rite, John Paul stepped down from the altar platform to kiss and embrace Gajowniczek, now 81, who had wept silently through the service. Gajowniczek recalls: "I was never able to thank him personally, but we looked into each other's eyes before he was led away...
Only 25 miles away lay Auschwitz and the adjoining concentration camp, Birkenau. The Pope visited the cell of a beatified Franciscan priest, Martyr Maximilian Kolbe, who offered his own life to save a fellow prisoner. The prisoner, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was there, along with other survivors of the camp (including some 200 priests), eager to roll up their sleeves and show the tattooed serial numbers on their arms. Said one of the first inmates, an old man who had been injected with typhoid in a Nazi medical experiment: "Our religion helped us survive the greatest hell on earth." Said another...
...Peter's Basilica in Rome, Pope Paul VI had declared him "Blessed," the most important single step in creating a saint. Last week's celebration in Poland marked the first anniversary of Kolbe's beatification, and the man he had saved -bent, white-haired Franciszek Gajowniczek, 69-was among the first to speak. "I want to express my thanks," he said haltingly, "for the gift of life...
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