Commemorative plaque in the cell of Maximilian Kolbe - SP3RN
Even those who are not religious commemorate and celebrate patron saints.
Think of Saint Nicholas for children, Saint Barbara for miners and firemen, and Saint Eloi for metal workers. But the radio amateurs and journalists also have a patron saint in Maximilian Kolbe since 1982.
This Catholic Polish priest was born on 8 January 1894 and set up a radio station in the 1930s in Niepokalanow, Poland, some 40 km west of Warsaw, and was a radio amateur known as SP3RN. He thwarted the Nazis by all possible means after the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 at Westerplatte near Gdansk. A militant anti-Nazi, he was captured by the Gestapo in February 1941 and imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
The Nazis punished an attempted escape of one prisoner by sentencing other 10 prisoners to death by starvation. A father with two young children begged to stay alive, after which priest Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to take his place. After three weeks without food or water, four emaciated prisoners remained alive, including Maximilian Kolbe. On 14 August 1941, a lethal injection was administered to these four prisoners, including Maximilian Kolbe.
Like the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of murdered prisoners, his body was incinerated in the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 15 August.