Maximilian Kolbe factory
The Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk e. V. is a humanitarian aid organization that provides aid for the survivors of the National Socialist concentration camps and ghettos . The registered association and the office are located in Freiburg im Breisgau .
task
Understanding and reconciliation between the Polish and German people as well as the task of supporting former concentration camp and ghetto prisoners from Poland and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, regardless of their religion, denomination or worldview, have been the purpose and concern of Maximilian from the very beginning Piston factory.
The focus of the work is the individual person, their personal history and their painful experiences during the time of National Socialism . Person-to-person contact is the real core of the work.
Origin and namesake
In 1964 a group of Christians from the German section of Pax Christi visited the former concentration camp Auschwitz . There they met former prisoners who lived on the edge of poverty. Gestures of reparation and financial compensation from the federal government were not in sight at the time. As part of the “Solidarity donation” campaign, Pax Christi Germany decided to take the first aid measures in the form of financial support as an expression of sympathy and solidarity with the concentration camp survivors.
Despite the most difficult political relations between Germany and Poland , the Maximilian Kolbe plant emerged in 1973, driven by Alfons Erb , then Vice President of Pax Christi, through a joint decision of the Central Committee of German Catholics and 13 Catholic associations.
With the choice of the name patron a clear sign was given: Father Maximilian Kolbe was already well known and admired in Poland at that time.
The Polish Franciscan Minorite Maximilian Kolbe, born in 1894, was the founder of the Franciscan monastery town of Niepokalanów and built the largest Catholic press center in Poland. Although his journalistic work spread anti-Semitic agitation and thus underpinned the prerequisites for the creation of the Holocaust at an early stage, Kolbe was arrested in February 1941, probably because his monastery town of Niepokalanów was home to many refugees at that time, including up to 1,500 Jews. In the end he was taken to Auschwitz , where mainly non-Jewish Polish prisoners were interned at the time. As punishment for the escape of a prisoner, ten concentration camp inmates were chosen at random there at the end of July 1941 and assigned to die in the “hunger bunker”. Maximilian Kolbe offered himself in exchange for the Catholic compatriot and father Franciszek Gajowniczek . After two weeks in the hunger bunker, inmate Kolbe, who was still alive, with the number 16,670, which was still typically low at the time, was killed by a phenol injection on August 14, 1941 and burned in the Auschwitz crematorium . Despite inhuman treatment in the camp, the missionary Kolbe preached love to his fellow prisoners and tried to console them. He was canonized in 1982 as a Catholic “martyr of love” .
activities
Supported primarily by private donations and isolated collections from church parishes, the Maximilian Kolbe plant has so far been able to carry out aid projects for concentration camp and ghetto survivors amounting to more than 60 million euros. The work has been the bearer of the donation seal of the German Central Institute for Social Issues (DZI) since 2001 and is therefore considered worthy of funding.
Humanitarian aid in Poland
Around 18,000 concentration camp survivors still live in Poland today. The Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk supports those affected with concrete humanitarian aid :
- annual donations of between 150 and 600 euros on request to around 1,500 people,
- Offering professional and financial support for home care by nurses and other care workers,
- Medical therapy and counseling centers in Lodz and Krakow with doctors from all disciplines,
- Loan station for medical aids,
- around 500 course places and 150 places for single people annually over the Christmas holidays and the turn of the year,
- German volunteers visit around 800 bedridden concentration camp survivors in Poland every year.
Self-help network for concentration camp survivors in Poland
In almost all of the 49 former Polish voivodships , concentration camp survivors act as stewards to coordinate the offers of help from the Maximilian Kolbe plant. They are the first point of contact for their comrades and important multipliers. You organize z. B. special medical consultation hours. In Lodz and Krakow they look after the social medicine centers, which also serve as meeting points and advice centers.
Humanitarian aid in the countries of the former Soviet Union
Since 1992 there has also been support for concentration camp survivors in the successor states of the Soviet Union . In the Ukraine , for Russia , Belarus and the Baltic States 26 aid flights were carried out. Between 1200 and 1500 people received monetary and material aid from the hands of German volunteers. Relief goods transports have been replaced by aid and encounter projects in Eastern European countries since 2002 : Employees of the Maximilian Kolbe factory meet concentration camp and ghetto survivors at central meetings and make home visits to the sick. All survivors receive financial support. Since 2002 such projects have been carried out in Moldova , Russia and the region around Kaliningrad , Belarus, Lithuania , Latvia , Estonia , Ukraine and Kazakhstan . Visits to other regions take place every year.
Reconciliation through encounter
Since 1978, recreational and meeting stays for concentration camp and Holocaust survivors have been organized in Germany. Since then, over 12,000 invitations have been received. Every year around 400 people from Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries take part in these volunteer visits.
Often these visits are the first contact with the “land of perpetrators” after the end of the war. The re-encounter with Germans, the German language and often with the places of suffering leads in many cases to a spiritual liberation. Visits to parishes and schools, where many of the former prisoners talk about their painful experiences in the concentration camps, are part of almost all of the encounters.
Schoolchildren meet contemporary witnesses
People who suffered unspeakably in concentration camps pass their experiences on to young people. In addition to school visits as part of meeting stays, the Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk invites numerous concentration camp and ghetto survivors to Germany every year in order to conduct targeted discussions with young people in qualified school projects.
Voluntary work in Germany
In Germany, around 80 volunteers are committed to the work of the plant. Unselfishly and with a great deal of time, money and energy, they are the bearers of personal encounters and affection and thus make the various initiatives of the Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk possible in the first place.
Awards
In 2007 the Maximilian Kolbe factory was awarded the prize of the Vereinigung Gegen Vergessen - Für Demokratie , in 2008 the Eugen Kogon Prize . In 2009, it was awarded the Active for Democracy and Tolerance 2009 award from the Alliance for Democracy and Tolerance for its contemporary witness work in Saxony . In 2010 the Anton Roesen Prize of the Diocesan Council of Catholics in the Archdiocese of Cologne went to the volunteers of the Maximilian Kolbe factory.
Fonts
- Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk (Ed.): Ask us, we are the last ... testimonies from survivors of the concentration camps and ghettos. Maximilian Kolbe Factory, Freiburg 2003.
- Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk (Ed.): I was in Auschwitz from the beginning ... Memories of Michal Ziolkowski. Maximilian Kolbe Factory, Freiburg 2009.
literature
- Arkadiusz Stempin: "The Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk" - pioneer of the German-Polish reconciliation 1960-1989. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006, ISBN 3-506-72975-6 .
- Wolfgang Gerstner among others: Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk: 30 years in the service of reconciliation. dialogverlag, Münster 2002.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Paul Magino: Live and die for others. On the anniversary of Maximilian Kolbe's death In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , August 7, 2011; accessed on May 11, 2019.
- ↑ Catholic anti-Semitism in Auschwitz.
- ^ Kolbe & Anti-Semitism. The New York Review of Books, April 14, 1983
- ↑ Kolbe to Anti-Semite?
- ^ Maximilian Kolbe Werk eV DZI database; accessed on May 8, 2019.
- ^ Maximilian Kolbe Work. In: www.gegen-vergessen.de. Retrieved June 1, 2018 .
Coordinates: 48 ° 0 ′ 15 ″ N , 7 ° 51 ′ 24 ″ E