Germany invades Poland, and a friary's daily newspaper stops

NIEPOKALANÓW, Poland, September 1, 1939 AD — German forces crossed into Poland before dawn this morning, and Mały Dziennik (the Little Daily), the newspaper printed at this friary, did not go out today. The friary’s own record of the first day of the war is a single line: the dispatch of the paper was stopped.

Niepokalanów is a Franciscan friary about forty kilometres west of Warsaw. It runs the largest printing press in Central Europe. Seven hundred and sixty-two people live here. They are 13 priests, 18 novices, 527 brothers, 122 boys in the junior seminary and 82 candidates for the priesthood. The presses print a monthly magazine, Rycerz Niepokalanej (the Knight of the Immaculata), and a daily newspaper. The superior is Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a Conventual Franciscan of forty-five. He founded the house on donated land in 1927 AD and was elected its guardian in 1936 AD, on his return from six years in Japan.

The attack on the country began at a quarter to five this morning. About one and a half million German soldiers moved out of their encampments. German aircraft bombed Polish towns and cities as well as positions behind the Polish lines.

The friars here saw the war for the first time in the middle of the afternoon. Brother Juliusz Grzybowski, one of the friars, wrote down the hour: “On the first of September, a Friday, at three in the afternoon twenty-five bombers with black crosses on their wings, droning ominously, flew high in the blue of the sky over Niepokalanów, in the direction of Warsaw.”

St. Maximilian Kolbe called the friars together last month, with the war plainly close, and spoke to them about suffering. He holds that a man’s life has three stages: the preparation for his work, the work itself, and then suffering. He told them they cannot know the hour or the manner of their death. He urged them to be ready to give their blood in the service of the Immaculata. His text was Christ’s word that no one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.

The paper that stopped today has been printed at Niepokalanów since 1935 AD. Its weekday run is about 137,000 copies, and the weekend edition reaches about 220,000. That puts it among the largest daily newspapers in Poland. St. Maximilian Kolbe set down what the presses were for in 1926 AD, the year before he broke ground at Teresin: “A very important thing is the purpose of our publishing house, that is, that it is always concerned with winning the world for the Immaculata, every single soul that exists and will exist until the end of the world.”

A paper that size has irritated the German police, and St. Maximilian Kolbe knows it. He expects retribution to follow.