A soldier let the friars ring their own bell

NIEPOKALANOW, Poland, September 19, 1939 AD — German soldiers had been at the Franciscan friary of Niepokalanow, outside Warsaw, since September 13. The friars had gone on living and working in the house. Germany had invaded Poland eighteen days before. The friary kitchen had been feeding Polish soldiers and refugees on the roads. On September 12 wounded Polish soldiers were carried in.

This morning Brother Bonawentura was carrying food out in front of the kitchen for the refugees. A German soldier waved him over and spoke to him in German. He could not understand a word of it. A brother who knew German came across and translated the order. Every friar in the house was to gather in one place.

The brothers explained that at Niepokalanow they were called together by a bell, and asked whether they could ring it. The soldier agreed. Brother Bonawentura went first to St. Maximilian Kolbe and asked whether to ring it. St. Maximilian Kolbe thought it over and told him to ring it.

Eighteen days of war

St. Maximilian Kolbe, 45, is a Franciscan priest. He built this place out of a field at Teresin, outside Warsaw. The house was given a name: Niepokalanow, the City of the Immaculata. He has been its guardian since he came back from Japan in 1936 AD.

The friary had its own printing house. It put out Mały Dziennik (the Little Daily), one of the largest daily papers in Poland. That paper had made the house an enemy of the German police.

At three o’clock on September 1, twenty-five bombers passed high over the buildings on their way to Warsaw. On September 5 St. Maximilian Kolbe told the brothers that everyone in the county had been ordered to leave. He sent them away.

That afternoon he went up into the pulpit and said goodbye to them: “Niepokalanow is not these fences or these buildings. Where a man of Niepokalanow is, there is Niepokalanow.”

Almost all of them went. After the shelling on September 7 only a few dozen friars were left in the house. At morning prayer today St. Maximilian Kolbe told those who remained to trust God. Then they ate breakfast and went out to their work.

The bell rang. It was the first time the bell had called the brothers together at a soldier’s order. They came out into the open wondering why it was ringing at that hour. Many of them were in work clothes, wooden clogs and dirty habits.

The soldier ordered them into rows of five. He told them they would be marched to the command post to have their papers checked. They asked for time to change first. He allowed it. He counted them, and warned that if one of them escaped the rest would be shot. They came back in clean habits. The commander counted them again. The number was right.

The two who could stay

Ten wounded men were lying in the house. The friars asked the commander to leave three of their own behind. Two would nurse the wounded, and one would watch the buildings. He told them the buildings needed nobody. Two could stay with the wounded.

For the first place the friars chose the brother who looked after the sick. For the second they named their own guardian, St. Maximilian Kolbe. He turned it down. He said he would go with the other friars, wherever they were taken.

They went out through the friary gate with soldiers around them, some on bicycles and some on foot. A young woman saw them and ran up to the escort in tears, begging that the friars be let go. St. Maximilian Kolbe comforted her and told her they would be back soon. The road was lined with German soldiers, waiting to move into the empty friary. At the Warsaw highway the friars were ordered to unload two trucks of anti-tank shells. Then they were put into the same trucks.

The trucks pulled away toward the camp at Lamsdorf, across the German border. On the road St. Maximilian Kolbe spoke to the friars riding with him. This might be the Immaculata’s way of founding a new City, he said — in Germany, through them.