Nagasaki and Auschwitz

 Yesterday was the feast day of the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe, who ended up in Auschwitz because his Catholic newspaper/magazine opposed the Nazis.

He is considered a martyr, not for his politics, but because when the Nazis decided to punish prisoners for an escapee from the concentration camp, by starving ten men to death, he volunteered to take the place of one of them, a married man with children.

Since Nazis hated priests more than Jews or political dissadents, they let him do this.

So a real peson. 

But the irony is that the story of his death is not just a shiny Catholic one dimensional story: because his story is echoed in several literary works.

He was one of the inspirations behind the fictional priest in the play the Deputy, who questions the silence of the Pope at a time when Jews and other innocoent people are being massacred by the Nazis. The background is that this is the source of many who condemn Pope Pius XII, which is not a surprise since it was essentially written as a broad side by a communist against a Pope who had of course opposed the Nazis but often quietly but was also a leading critic of the communists at a time when the left was silent against Stalin's terror state.

But it is a real question for us is: Do you openly condemn the powerful tyrant, seeing yourself as a proud hero in your own eyes, but leading to the massacre of not just yourself but a lot of innocent people, or do you quiestly try to save as many innocent people as possible?

So Father Kolbe is remembered to remind folk that the Nazis murdered 3000 priests in their concentration camps.

But in the West, it is often forgotten that Father Kolbe spent several years in Japan, in Nagasaki, trying to spread the faith.

And because of this, he is a character in several Japanese stories by Nobel prize winner Shasuku Endo: especially in two the the short story collection LINK

Endo was a Catholic, baptised as a child, but he also has Catholicism and religion and the question of suffering is the theme in many of his novels.

BenedictineInstitute has an essay about Kolbe and Nagasaki as seen in one of Endo's stories:

The noted Catholic novelist Shūsaku Endō modeled the character Mouse in his 1963 short story “Fuda-no-Tsuji” in part on Fr. Kolbe. Like many of Endō’s short stories, it flits between the present and the past: both Tokyo of the 1930s and of the Edo period when thousands of Catholics were martyred in Japan .... The protagonist Inoue knew Mouse as a German monk (Kolbe’s surname was German) who worked at his university, but he clearly had little respect for the weakling. Decades later, at a reunion with his classmates, he finds out that Mouse had been put in a concentration camp where he offered himself in place of a condemned prisoner and was starved to death. Endo’s Inoue reflects: “and if, in fact, Mouse had died for a friend—for love—then that was not a tale from the long-gone days of the Edo period, but an incident that commanded a place in the man’s own heart.”....

You might be more familar with Endo's works from this movie.

Here is a discussion by Martin Scorsese about the film:

The book and film Silence is not just about faith, but about forgiveness and trying to do the right thing. Would you die for your faith? Ah, but would you deny your faith in order to save the lives of others? And if so, would God forgive you for this horrific sin?

Endo's stories often have the theme not just of questioning where God is in suffering, but about can your sin be forgiven? Is God the wrathful king or is he like Buddha, kind and forgiving, and a compassionate father welcoming the prodigal son?

there is a lot of crappy superficial stuff out there about religion in the PC world of western culture. Being fundamentalist means you never have to say you doubt, not just with Christians or Muslims but fundamentalism of the new atheists.

but in Catholicism, doubt and questioning and being in a dark night of the soul is considered part of one's life journey to holiness (or the opposite: such things lead many to an atheism that is not so much denial of God but telling God you are so mad at him you refuse to believe in him to punish him: so there!).

Too often people of faith are shown in films/tv etc in the west as cultists with wide staring eyes that don't blink, rather than as human beings.

But the humans I know who were killed (for serving the poor in an African civil war) were not wide eyed cultists but people who chose to continue their work despite the danger.

and that decision was made, not from a fanatic type faith but in a humble decision that was renewed every day to continue the work of caring for the sick and running schools despite the danger because that was their duty in life, that was how they served God.