Maximilian Kolbe's Sacrifice

In the summer of 1941, Auschwitz was not yet the industrialized death factory the world would come to know. It was a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, and terror was maintained not through mass extermination but through calculated, personal cruelty. When a prisoner escaped in July, the SS commandant Karl Fritzsch decreed a collective punishment: ten men from the escapee's barracks would be selected and locked in the underground bunker of Block 11 — the building prisoners called the "Death Block" — to starve to death.