Here’s that promised piece on Kolbe. I must confess to finding it incredibly
frustrating to articulate and translate my thoughts into words on a screen.
But, for better or for worse, here it is (and apologies for the unseemly
length).

Maximilian Kolbe, 1894-1941 (and Charles)

A dear college friend once told me about Maximilian Kolbe in the midst of a
seemingly interminable late night discussion that flitted between morality,
religion and cooking Thai curries. In retrospect, my points in this particular
discussion – one of many I fondly recall – were not particularly compelling.  I
remember resorting to ‘that’s just your opinion’ rather too often, and my one
good point – about how wonderful galangel is when making Thai (or, rather,
vaguely South East Asian) food – was rather a meagre one. Anyhow, I remember
being quite taken by the story she narrated about Kolbe, and that was despite,
I confess, almost not wanting to be taken by it.

I won’t mention much about his life as a whole, though it is hardly
uninteresting. The aspect which continues to fascinate me is his death. I
cannot write much about the various sources with which this has been pieced
together, though I understand that it is based on the testimonies of various
inmates and camp wardens.  This does not trouble me at all: so much of what we
know about the concentration camps is based on such testimonies (as opposed to
administrative sources) and our knowledge is all the richer for it. The
writings of a Viktor Frankl or Primo Levi are far more compelling – and I mean
that including in the sense of writing history – than, say, a secretary’s log
(even if such a log is vital source material too). It does mean that there are
some things I will not be able to answer if quizzed: for instance, the account
below of Kolbe’s brief dialogue with an Auschwitz commandant doubtless glosses
over the fact of interpretation (I mean in the sense of language barriers).

In February 1941, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Warsaw.
(He had been involved in various print and radio undertakings before the Nazis’
arrival and, I understand, his arrest was related to this). In May, he was
transferred to Auschwitz. Though he would be dead a few months later, there are
some testimonies about his time there (for instance, by a doctor who treated
him: Kolbe had earlier in the year suffered an inflammation of the lungs).

Now, there was some sort of rule at Auschwitz that if a man escaped, ten men
would be killed as punishment. And, the story goes, in July, a man from Kolbe’s
block escaped. The men from the block were led out in front of the commandant,
Karl Fritsch.  It was understood that the punishment would be the starvation
bunker: at the height of summer, this meant an agonising death, usually in
days, without food or water. Ten men were selected. One of these, Franciszek
Gajowniczek, had been imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He
instinctively exclaimed: ‘My poor wife! My poor children! What will they do?’.

At this point, Kolbe stepped forward, took off his cap and offered himself: “I
am a Catholic priest,” he explained to the commandant, “Let me take his place.
I am old. He has a wife and children.”

Interestingly, the commandant came to agree to this. Gajowniczek stepped back
into file and Kolbe joined the wretched nine in their grim fate. In the bunker,
things soon became terrible. Some men would drink their own urine. According to
a janitor (if my memory serves me correctly), however, there were no screams or
even the sounds of the desperate one might have expected. Kolbe is said to have
led these men in hushed prayers and hymns. A fortnight in, four men remained,
including Kolbe. Needing the cell (for more conspicuous punishment?), the camp
executioner came in to inject each man’s arm with a dose of lethal carbolic
acid. At his turn, Kolbe, kneeling down, is said to have raised up and offered
his arm to the executioner. He died on 14th August 1941. For what it is worth,
I should add that Kolbe was beatified in 1970 and canonised in 1982.
Gajowniczek, I believe, was present at both ceremonies. And, apparently, there
is also one more detail: the man whose alleged escape precipitated the whole
episode was, apparently, found dead in a latrine not long after. It appears
that he had fallen in by mistake.

Now, let me be clear. I do not think that Kolbe’s being Catholic – or even being
a priest – is separable from his story, from his very identity. But, I don’t at
all wish to recall this in a triumphalistic way. (My sister’s ex-boyfriend is a
quarter Polish. His maternal grandmother was an inmate at Auschwitz for several
years and he said that the greatest perversities – he did not specify – in
Auschwitz were perpetrated by Catholic priests).

Rather, I find it interesting – particular the exchange, the literal redemption
of Gajowniczek – for several reasons, albeit ones which are not easy to
articulate. First off, I am struck by, for want of a better phrase, the sheer
goodness of such a deed.  This begs all sorts of questions. What were his
duties? Was this a ‘supererogatory’ act? What were his motives? Do the
consequences matter? For instance, to a strict consequentialist – I mean the
devious kind who is not averse to torturing philosophy students with devilish
scenarios featuring fat pot-holers and narrow cave entrances – upon hearing of
the bare bones of the exchange, it might or might not be good.

Perhaps there is something awry when we can even speak in the language of
consequentialism versus deontology versus virtue ethics etc in immediately
responding to this kind of deed. I’m certainly glad that my immediate reaction
was one which I can only imperfectly articulate as that sense of sheer
goodness. (It’s worth pointing out that this would still be my reaction, I
imagine, even if the commandant had decided to make Kolbe an eleventh damned
man). It is the kind of sheer goodness that animates and relieves so many of
the stories in the Holocaust. There is another one in Primo Levi’s If This Is
Man, and I think it’s worth quoting. The incident takes place during the last
weeks at Auschwitz, when Russian artillery was audible and liberation felt
tantalisingly close:

“That night held ugly surprises.
Ladmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor wreck of a man. He was (or had
been) a Dutch Jew, seventeen years old, tall, thin and gentle. He had been in
bed for three months; I have no idea how he had managed to survive the
selections. He had had typhus and scarlet fever successively; at the same time
a serious cardiac illness had shown itself, while he was smothered with
bedsores, so much so that by now he could only lie on his stomach. Despite all
this, he had a ferocious appetite. He only spoke Dutch, and none of us could
understand him…In the middle of the night, he groaned and then threw himself
from his bed. He tried to reach the latrine, but was too weak and fell to the
ground crying and shouting loudly.
Charles lit the lamp…and we were able to ascertain the gravity of the situation.
The boy’s bed and the floor were filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly
becoming insupportable…And the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, formed a
terrible source of infection, while he could certainly not be left all night to
groan and shiver in the cold in the middle of the filth.
Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in silence. While I held the lamp,
he cut all the dirty patches from the straw mattress and the blankets with a
knife. He lifted Ladmaker from the ground with the tenderness of a mother,
cleaned him as best as possible with straw taken from the mattress and lifted
him into the remade bed in the only position in which the unfortunate fellow
could lie, He scraped the floor with a scrap of tin plate, diluted a little
chloramines and finally spread disinfectant over everything, including
himself.”

I imagine that upon reading this sort of thing, we marvel at something. One
interesting, additional point, in both cases, lies with what might, from a
particular perspective, be the futility of these acts (though I do not think
that this is quite what we marvel at). Ladmaker will most probably die. Kolbe
might just end up getting both himself and Gajowniczek killed. Even at his
execution – the symbolic gesture of offering one’s arm, of accepting death, of
dying well – is futile, in a sense. And yet these are also symbolically
powerful acts. And something of their power, inevitably, lies in imagining
oneself in such a position. I must confess that, as much as I would like to
think otherwise, I could not vouch that I would act in such a way.

Second, even if our responses to these stories are emotional – and why should
they not be? – I am not so easily convinced that they can be easily interpreted
(and, rather summarily, dismissed) as ‘just’ emotive responses, as if the truly
objective/scientific/rational (delete as appropriate) response would be: Kolbe,
male, bearded, approximately 6”1, member of block x; at 1403hrs, Kolbe speaks
etc. The responses turn upon understanding what is enacted (and, to add another
layer, we might be responding both to Charles’ tenderness and Levi’s recognition
of this tenderness). The actions of a Kolbe or a Charles are intelligible to us.
This does not mean we can possibly know the precise intentions, though we might
imagine them and this imagining has certain limits. At the very least, is there
something about the enactments in such stories, about their very much
intelligible actions, which elicits such a response?

Third, these have to be stories. They are narratives. And I am quite taken by
the idea that, in all sorts of ways, narratives are central to our
understanding of all manner of things. To reiterate, even something like the
Kolbe story or anecdotes in Levi is both completely singular and yet wholly
informative for the light it sheds on the possibilities for human (inter)action
in somewhere like Auschwitz. And it offers the kind of illumination of being at
somewhere like Auschwitz that an entire textbook on the excavation of Auschwitz
could not.

These are scattered – and hopefully – not too trite thoughts. I think that I am
probably right in thinking that most people are moved by such stories and
respond to them with something akin to what I called a sense of sheer goodness
(whatever terms others might use). Let’s say as a general rule that most
people, roughly speaking, do respond in such a way.

Here are two possible questions to consider: what of those who do not respond in
such a way? Suppose someone were to say, ‘Well, Kolbe didn’t save any of the
other nine’, or ‘Charles was being stupid, he should have left that guy to
reduce his own chances of contracting typhus’: are our reactions ‘just emotive’
to the point that I cannot reasonably question the propriety – moral,
intellectual – of such a response?

There were many Jewish boys at my school, and I remember that we always had a
memorial for the Shoah each year. (Jewish assembly – religious assembly was on
Thursday, with various options, from Sikh to Catholic, and a non-religious one
too – was possibly the most popular: you would see boys with turbans listening
to a Rabbi sing on his guitar about kosher food). One time, I remember that we
finished and filed out. There had been readings animated by silent documentary
footage from various concentration camps, including those seemingly familiar
photographs of emaciated inmates. I still remember a boy (Jewish, as it
happens) make a joke, as we treaded out, about their being anorexics and all he
got were silent glares. My long-winded point is this: there is – or, I want
there to be – something more meet, more adequate about the solemn response
almost all of us quite naturally enacted rather than that of the boy who
quipped. It seems to me that our responses were more ‘adequate’ to what we had
seen and heard depicted, they grappled more with what was understood. Or, at
least, our reactions differed not just in terms of emotion, but in our
understandings of the gravity of what we had witnessed.

And, second, if I am right that most people do marvel at such stories, their
marvelling is undoubtedly real: that is, they really do marvel. But are they
just projecting a wholly subjective sense of the marvellous, of ‘sheer
goodness’, onto a Charles or a Kolbe? Or is it truly worthy of marvelling to
offer one’s life for or cradle a fellow inmate with “the tenderness of a
mother”?

I feel a certain affinity for Alfred having been born and bred in what was once Wessex, and having lived for a while in the place of his birth, Wantage, Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire). There is a statue of him in Wantage that I used to walk past on my way to work. There is also a statue of him in Winchester, which I see every fortnight when I drive there on some business (not financial) that is indelibly linked to the time when I lived in Wantage.  It would be nice to think that he watches over me, looks out for me and guides me, for an excellent guide he would make.
 
We call him “The Great” but he wasn’t known by this title until a long time after his reign from 871-99. The earliest records which refer to him in this way are from 16th century historians. He definitely wasn’t a legend in his own lifetime, his greatness only being appreciated from a distance. As soon as he came to power (which he had to wait for, being the youngest child) he faced a tough time of it. A Viking army had invaded further north in 865. Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia (the middle bit of England) had all resorted to paying them off to stop them inflicting any further damage, and the Vikings had settled camps in these areas. Nearly the whole of Alfred’s reign was blighted by the Vikings who could not be trusted to keep to the oaths that they made and would regularly display what we would today call “challenging behaviour” and  “pushing the boudaries” ; ie they just wouldn’t bloody behave! Alfred himself paid them off to keep them sweet, but even exchanging hostages did not prevent the Vikings from going back on their promise. At one point the Vikings took over Thorney island (very near to where I live)  and were held under siege there until they agreed to leave. They were one monstrous pain in the backside who took up time and resources and cost the lives of a lot of Alfred’s men.
 
Alfred somehow managed to find the time to devote to his own education. He was “ignorant of letters” in his youth so had a lot of catching up to do. He was not only concerned with his own learning, but that of others too. He set up a school for his own children and those of the court.
 
Asser, who wrote his biography of Alfred in 893, was a monk from St David’s in Wales. He was one of several learned men that Alfred brought to his court to facilitate his own learning. Alfred learnt Latin which enabled him to translate a number of books which he felt were “most necessary for all men to know” . These were “Pastoral Care” by Pope Gregory, “Consolation of Philosophy” by Boethius and the Psalter (he managed the first 50 psalms before his death). Alfred didn’t feel the need to stick to a straight translation of these texts and often included very revealing aspects his own concerns, thoughts and history.  The translations were distributed widely so that people would benefit from their wisdom.
 
In addition to Asser’s work and Alfred’s translations we have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a contemporary source, as well as Alfred’s will and some charters, laws and letters. From these it is obvious that Alfred was a very just man, always concerned for the welfare and development of his subjects.
 
He suffered from a mysterious illness for much of his life which would cause him considerable pain. It is not clear from the desription what this would have been, but from my reading it sounds a bit like kidney stone trouble. It didn’t stop him marrying or having children.
 
The story of “Alfred and the cakes” is probably legend as it does not appear in any contemporary sources. There are several versions, each showing Alfred in a different light according to the intention of the writer.
 
One thing that I read which was unexpected was that Alfred twice travelled to Rome as a child. At only four years of age he accompanied his father on a visit, and two years later he went again. I dread to think how long that would have taken, and how uncomfortable it would have been.
 
Lastly, I smiled when I read the genealogy of Alfred, which of course went all the way back to Adam. The name of Alfred’s ancestor 23 generations back is the one that I choose for my own son.