St. Maximilian Kolbe, Pray for Us

Today is the feast day of St. Maximilian Kolbe. On this day 53 years ago, he was executed in Auschwitz, one of ten men starved to death in retaliation for the escape of a prisoner. After weeks of starvation and dehydration had not killed him, the guards, needing his cell for other prisoners, ordered him killed by an injection of carbolic acid. St. Maximilian had volunteered to join the condemned in the place of another man, who was a young husband and the father of several children.