Who is St. Maximilian Kolbe?

St. Maximilian Kolbe was a Franciscan priest from Poland devoted to the Blessed Mother. He edited and published a large Catholic newspaper which spread love and devotion to Christ and His Blessed Mother.  After the Nazi occupation of Poland, Father Maximilian was imprisoned at Auschwitz death camp in 1941. There he offered his life for another prisoner and was condemned to slow death in a starvation bunker. Despite forced starvation Fr. Maximilian continued to minister to the prisoners that were with him and never lost his faith in Christ. On August 14, 1941, his captors, impatient for his death, ended his life with a fatal injection. Pope John Paul II canonized Maximilian as a "martyr of charity" in 1982.