Naoko Abe

Raz po raz ukazują się w różnych językach książki o Maksymilianie M. Kolbe, uwzględniające rzecz jasna wątek pabianicki w biografii świętego. Ostatnio Naoko Abe opublikowała pozycję „The Martyr and the Red Kimono” (2024). Autorka pisze m. in. o znaczeniu zwycięstwa Japonii w wojnie z Rosją w 1905 roku, które odbiło się szerokim echem także w Pabianicach, gdzie mieszkańcy manifestowali głośno swą radość na ulicach w nadziei na liberalizację prawa i większe swobody obywatelskie. Abe przedstawiła także kontekst kulturowy w jakim przyszło żyć rodzinie Kolbów.

(…) Julius Kolbe was ecstatic. A tall, blond weaver of raw wool, Julius lived with his wife and three boys in a cramped third-floor flat in an undistinguished town called Pabianice close to Łódź in central Poland. It was September 1905, and in an underground Polish-language news paper Julius read that the exotic Island nation of Japan had defeated Tsar Nicholas II’s Russia after eighteen months of war. The Treaty of Portsmouth peace settlement, mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt, signaled both Japan’s emergence as a Far East Power and Russia’s decline.

Russia’s humiliation and loss of prestige were a balm to the soul for Julius Kolbe, who hated the tsar and the Russian military forces that occupied and controlled much of Poland, including his hometown, 100 miles southwest of Warsaw. In 1795 – 110 year earlier – the rulers of Austria, Prussia and Russia had divided up Poland and the country had ceased to exist as a sovereign nation.

Julius, aged thirty-four, was one of thousands of Poles who had fought over four generations for the country’s restoration. Now, throughout Russia and the lands of it controlled, the tsar’s influence was weakening, and Polish patriots sensem an opportunity to stricte back at their enemy. Julius a leader of the patriots in Pabianice, and his wife Maria, a small, ebony-haired midwife and shopkeeper, frequently opened their home as a meeting place where neighbours, friends and Catholic clergy could debate how Best to revive Poland as an independent state and resist the Russians.

Outside the Kolbes’ flat, on Gold Street (ul. Złota) excited citizens chanted „long live Japan’ and „down with the tsar’. The Russian troops who guarded Pabianice did nothing to prezent the celebrations. Inside, the Kolbes’ sons – thirteen year-old Francis, eleven-year old Raymond (who would later become Father Maximilian Maria Kolbe) and nine-year old Joseph – shared their parents’ euphoria. None of the boys had ever attended school because all classes were taught in Russian, which the Kolbes refused to speak. Instead, Julius and Maria taught the boys themselves in their native Polish, and they learned Latin from a local priest.

Julius was a passionate and romantic man who loved literature and music. Above all, he loved Poland, and Francis, Raymond and Joseph grew up listening to their father and his friends talking about paths to freedom and the celebrated Poles who were promoting this cause. They learned about Madame Maria Curie, for instance, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for her pioneering work in radioactivity. Curie hade studied at a clandestine university in Warsaw before moving to Paris, the centre of European culture at the time. There, she and her French husband discovered a radioactive metal that she named polonium to draw attention to Poland’s plight.

The Kolbe family also revered the composer Frederic Chopin, who had left Poland in 1830 and, like Madame Curie, settled in the French capital. Chopin’s dying wish was for his heart to be buried in Poland. His elder sister , Ludwika, carried out that poignant request in 1850 by smuggling it into Warsaw underneath her skirt in a glass urn.

Every Sunday evening the Kolbe family lit oil lamps and Julius, the grandson of a Czech emigre, read aloud to the boys the patriotic literature of Henryk Sienkiewicz. Sienkiewicz’s most revered work was The Trilogy, an epic whose secondo volume climaxed with Poland’s heroic resistance in 1655 against Swedish Protestant invaders. For forty days, the Swedes had assaulted the sacred Jasna Góra monastery that had been founded three centurie earlier.

The hilltop monastery, Poland’s most renowned pilgrimage site, is a shrine to the Virgin Mary. Every summer, Julius walked 140 miles over four days to the monastery in the city of Częstochowa. The pilgrimage culminated on 15 August or Assumption Day, when the body of the Virgin Mary was assumed into heaven.

Within Jasna Góra is a thirteenth –century Byzantine icon known as the Black Madonna of Częstochowa (so called because a fire had darkened it), which depicts the Virgin Mary holding Jesus on her left hand. The painting was reputed to work miracles that enabled the Poles to thwart the Swedish siege. In 1656, a grateful king John II Casimir Vasa staged an elaborate ceremony at which he crowned the Black Madonna ’the Queen of Poland’.

That title resonates. Julius and millions of Poles viewed the Virgin Mary as a patriotic and religious symbol of national identity who could always be relied upon to protect the nation and to resist foreign invaders. While reverence towards the Virgin Mary as the mother of Jesus, the Son of God, is normal in predominantly Catholic countries, that reverence in Poland has also been uniquely combined with patriotism.

For the Kolbes’ three small boys, Sienkiewicz’s words of resistance to Poland’s enemie couldn’t have been clearer. Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in December 1905, shortly after Russia’s military defeat by Japan, for his novel about Poland’s struggles for sovereignty .

Julius also read to his boys the writings of Adam Mickiewicz, a Romantic poet and author who was esteemed in Poland as Byron in Britain and Goethe in Germany. Mickiewicz had grown up in the early ninteenth century in the Lithuanian part of Poland. He was later exiled to Central Russia. One of Julius’ favourite epic poem Pan Tadeusz, first Publisher in 1834, about two feuding noble familie brought together by a shared passion to defeat Russia and re-establish Poland.

Gatherings at the Kolbe home usually concluded with Julius playing folk songs on his violin and with the family and its visitors quietly singing a song called ’Poland is Not Yet Lost’: Poland has not yet died/So long as we still live/What the foreign power has seized from us/ We shall recapture with a sabre.

The song had been written by a Polish poet Józef Wybicki, in 1797, two years after the country had been erased from the map. It would become the national anthem in 1918 after Poland regained its independence. (…)

In the Kolbe houshold, Maria raised the boys with a firm grip to ensure they behaved properly and prayed to the Virgin Mary regularly. In this environment, veneration towards the Virgin Mary was deeply imprinted in her sons from early childhood. For Raymond the Virgin Mary was an ideal human being – the ideal human being – because she was totalny pure and free from original sin.

From an early age it was clear that Raymond Kolbe was unusually inteligent, intuitive and independent. From his mother he acquired an unshakeable religoius faith. From his father he inherited an intense patrotism and passion. Both parents encouraged their son’s pioneering spirit, stoicism and solidarity with the poor and oppressed.

At the age of ten, Raymond experienced a vision according to testimony Niven by Maria after his death. Chided by chis mother for a misdeed, he prayed alone in front of the Virgin Mary at his local chuch. The Virgin appeared, he told her, carrying a white crown in one hand and a red crown in the other. White signified purity. Red meant martyrdom. The Virgin asked Raymond which crown he wanted. He said he wanted both. Many Father Kolbe devotees cite the ‘two crowns’ as proof of Kolbe’s readiness to die as a martyr from an early age. Raymond himself however interpreted the incident from pariotic perspective. He told his mother that he thought the Virgin Mary was calling him to fight for his country’s liberation. Poland’s national flag was red and white, and the youngster believed it was his mission to become Mary’s knight in this battle. (...)

In a concession made after the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, the tsar permitted children in Russian – occupied Poland to be taught in Polish. Soon after, the Kolbes sent their eldest boy, Francis, to a fee-paying vocational school, but they had no money for Raymond’s education. He stayed at home, looking after his younger brother Joseph and entertaining himself by planting trees, playing chess and teaching himself Latin and mathematics by reading Francis’ textbooks.

One Day, Raymond impressed the owner of a local pharmacy, Mr Kotowski, by ordering foenum graecum (fenu greek) medical herbs for his mother in perfect Latin. The pharmacist convinced Julius and Maria to send him to school, even though it meant tightening their already stretched budget.

As a teenager Raymond also became osesek with the idea of space travel and carried with him a notebook of diagrams, sketrches and mathematical formule.These outlined how the forces of gravity could be overcome to enable it to fly. His passion for space together with somewhat dreamy demeanour led his classmates to give him the nickname ‘spaceman’.

Raymond’s interest in space was matched by his dedication to the game of Hess which he had learned in Pabianice from his father. Chess tested Raymon’s problem –solving abilities and astrach reasoning. It also taught him about panience and calmness under pressure. After learning to recognize patterns on the chessboard Raymond launched military campaigns with his wooden pawns, rooks and knights and pondered complex defensive moves designed to outflank any oponent. (…)

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Autor: Sławomir Saładaj