Last week in the auditorium of Grove City College’s Technological Learning Center, I joined a small group of students and outsiders who watched a film together in stunned silence. It’s a film they will never forget.
The movie is about the Holocaust, and specifically about the horror house known as Auschwitz. Providentially, this sobering, numbing film is also a unifying film, one badly needed during a time of rising antisemitism in America. It’s a film about a priest who brought a glimmer of light into that darkness for Christians and Jews alike, and even for atheists. His name was Maximilian Kolbe. The film is Triumph of the Heart.
Triumph of the Heart is a powerful work, difficult to watch and even more difficult to review. As someone who has long known and written about Kolbe’s story, I think I can be of assistance in providing crucial, helpful background to those about to see the movie.
Maximilian Maria Kolbe was born on January 8, 1894. A very devout boy, he entered seminary in Lwów, Poland. He completed his vows in 1914. He went to Rome where he earned two doctorates in philosophy and theology from two of the city’s most prestigious Pontifical universities.
Kolbe became very adept in the media technology of the day, harnessing new methods of communication, including the best available printing presses. He created a popular, influential publication called The Knights of the Immaculata, which he used to criticize the Nazi regime threatening his native land.
Once the Nazis seized Poland, they wasted little time rounding up and imprisoning Kolbe as well as the nation’s millions of Jews. On February 17, 1941, Kolbe was sent to a concentration camp. He became Prisoner #16670. He was singled out for special persecution and humiliation.
One day near the end of July 1941, one of the captives escaped Auschwitz. In response, the German commander ordered 10 other prisoners to be rounded up and starved to death. This was just one cruel method employed by the Nazis to deter anyone who dared to consider an escape.
One of them, a young father named Franciszek Gajowniczek, pleaded, “My wife! My children! I shall never see them again!” Kolbe stepped forward and announced that he was a priest and wanted to die in place of the young father—offering to lay down his own life for the life of his friend. Kolbe and the others were dispatched to an underground cell aptly known as Death Block 13.
Over the next two weeks, Kolbe said Mass and led the others in prayers and hymns. After two weeks of complete deprivation of food and water, only Kolbe remained alive among the 10. The Nazi guards decided to finally rid themselves of the pesky priest. They brought in a lethal solution of carbolic acid.
Bruno Borgowiec was an eyewitness. “Immediately after the S.S. men with the executioner had left I returned to the cell,” he later remembered, “where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant.”
The Nazis thought they had silenced his voice. Just the opposite was true. The outside world soon learned of Kolbe’s sacrifice.
Four decades later, on October 10, 1982, Maximilian Maria Kolbe would be sainted by a native son of Poland: Pope John Paul II, the first and only Polish pontiff, and himself a survivor of the Nazi occupation. There for the canonization was Franciszek Gajowniczek, the young father at Auschwitz who had been given a long extension of life by Kolbe, the so-called “Saint of Auschwitz.”
That’s the background, which is captured brilliantly but painfully in Triumph of the Heart. Regrettably, one element of my backdrop that isn’t carried through in the movie is Franciszek Gajowniczek’s appearance at Kolbe’s canonization, which I thought would be a beautiful ending, perhaps akin to the close of Saving Private Ryan. Unfortunately, the filmmakers left that thread out of the ending. They must have felt it was another moving part that would have kept the narrative not as tightly focused. Filmmakers make those hard choices.
That aside, viewers are spared nothing from inside that cell block. What they see is very hard to watch. It’s crushingly sad, even amid the spiritually uplifting moments and the promise of life and bliss eternal. The earthly suffering is so brutal that it seems like quite the defeat. But it’s the promise of a better existence beyond our harsh realm that constitutes the triumph of Kolbe and friends at Auschwitz. At the start of the film, when Kolbe offers himself in exchange for the condemned prisoner, the Nazi guard callously shrugs, “Very well, sir. You have proved nothing.” But in fact, he proved everything. He proved that this life is a proving ground for the next. Ultimately, our place and goal is not this world but the next.
To be sure, it doesn’t feel that way amid those bitter powers of the present darkness. But we fix our gaze not on the sufferings of this world but our resurrection to the glories of the next. And that was the triumph at Auschwitz. It was captured movingly and repeatedly by the filmmakers as with each prisoner’s earthly expiration they subtly showed the seemingly defeated victim alive again, alighted, the soul ready to ascend to its heavenly destination.
The movie was filmed on location in Lodz, Poland. The writer and director is Anthony D’Ambrosio and the company is Sherwood Fellows. It isn’t a cast of big names, but the actors provide impressive performances.
The filmmakers are Catholic, and they rightly retain the Catholic-Christian spirituality if not theology that’s the bedrock of the story and of Kolbe’s life and witness. At the same time, non-Catholics will appreciate and applaud that this film honors their faiths, too. The Jewish characters are kept Jewish. One of the first to perish is a Jewish professor of the Torah who amid the frowns musters a smile and tells Kolbe that he hadn’t thought there was an ounce of good left in the rotten world until he saw the priest offer himself for the other prisoner. “You have chutzpah, my friend!” he tells Kolbe. Near the end of the film, the priest pulverizes a sharp-pointed rock that the Nazi guards had left for the prisoners to slice their wrists and commit suicide. He creates ashes from the rock and makes a Lent-like sign of the cross on the foreheads of each cellmate. When he comes to the remaining Jewish man, the man offers not his head but his hand in a firm shake of faithful solidarity. The filmmakers did not insist on the Catholic priest converting every Jew in that room. They were faithful to the other faiths and the historical truth of what happened.
Throughout the film, the prisoners show a healthy respect for one another’s faith and the knowledge that they’re in this pit together, all sides battling the same evil foe. They even find a way to laugh about the situation, with the communist prisoner at one point remarking, “A communist, a Catholic, and a Jew—sounds like the beginning of a joke.” They bond nonetheless. They know that the beast at the door is Nazism, a friend of none of the men, an ally only to the sons of darkness. At one point, the atheist prisoner confesses to Fr. Kolbe that he doesn’t believe in Heaven but he does believe in Hell.
Indeed, by that point, how could he not? He was witnessing Hell. Maybe he wasn’t yet sure that God existed, but he was certainly sure that the Devil existed. That much was made clear to all in Death Block 13.
The film is ecumenical in the best way. It isn’t a display of some namby-pamby, sappy, silly, kumbaya, spineless ecumenism. And at this moment in America, when Jews and Christians need to come together to once again fight common foes, that’s a timely message and mission. Remarkable works like this deserve your support.
As for those of us watching inside that auditorium at Grove City College, you could have heard a pin drop when the film ended. I remember a similar reaction when I first watched Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. On those occasions, I left the theater alone. This time, the group coalesced in the back of the auditorium as we tried to put into words what we had just witnessed. I told the group that I was planning to write a review but felt speechless to put into words what I just saw.
You will probably feel the same way.