Of the 928 attempted escapes from Auschwitz, only 196 succeeded. So when three prisoners vanished in July 1941, the guards decided to take action. At the roll call in the square, ten men were selected at random to die by starvation in Block 11. As the names were called out, one man fell to his knees. He was a Polish army sergeant, a husband and a father. 

As he pleaded for his life, another prisoner stepped forward to die in his place. The guards barely blinked, simply taking the volunteer’s number 16670 they threw him into the underground cell. Over the next fourteen days, he sang hymns and prayed with the men as they faded away. When the door was finally opened, only the volunteer was alive. The guards prepared a lethal injection to finish him off. 

Witnesses said Prisoner 16670 calmly raised his arm to the needle. Even his executioners said he was a man like no other. Auschwitz, a name that chills the soul, a place where humanity’s darkest instincts were laid bare. Not just a concentration camp but a sprawling complex of suffering where over a million innocent lives were reduced to ash.

The railway tracks that lead through its infamous gates represent the final journey of so many innocent people, hoarded like cattle into carriages, suffocating in filth and fear. Mothers clutched their children as old men stared into the abyss of an uncertain future. The flick of an officer’s finger determined life or death. To the right, a temporary reprieve and to the left, the gas chambers disguised as showers.

 By 1942, Auschwitz was a central part of the Final Solution. It was expanded into a complex of huts, a labour camp and an extermination site. Over a million people died within its perimeter fence. Even after all these years, the atmosphere feels unusual. The acrid stench of death and the billowing smoke from the ovens has gone, but it’s impossible to walk through the place without imagining the pasta 

New arrivals deemed fit for work became slaves, their bodies quickly whittled down to skin and bone wrapped in those chilling striped garments. People’s names were erased from their identities and replaced by numbers tattooed on their arms. Even if a prisoner had the physical strength to attempt an escape the barbed wire fences and machine guns were waiting. 

Many decades later, a survivor said “I felt the only way out of Auschwitz was through the chimney” Many prisoners were subjected to horrific medical experiments by Josef Mengele. He performed procedures without anesthetic, including sterilisation, genetic testing, and exposure to deadly diseases.

 Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl from Amsterdam, whose personal diary became a record of the Holocaust, was arrested along with the rest of her family, and brought to Auschwitz in 1944. She and her sister, Margot, were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they perished. Their father, Otto, was the only family member to survive the war. He published his daughter’s writings as a testament to the horror of those years.

Even in the midst of such cruelty, stories of resilience emerged. Many whispered forbidden prayers, others smuggled scraps of food. A brave Jewish doctor performed lifesaving procedures in secret to prevent pregnant women from execution.

 Among the prisoners of Auschwitz walked another man of unwavering love. His name was Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest. Though often singled out for brutality and denied medical care, he continued sharing his meagre rations with the starving. To those on the verge of losing hope, he offered words of comfort, reminding them they were still human and still loved by God.

 Father Kolbe had been imprisoned earlier in the war when German forces raided a monastery where he sheltered 3,000 people. For this, he was dragged from his home, tortured and then transported to Auschwitz and branded Prisoner 16670.  During that summer of 1941, when those ten men were condemned to die by starvation, it was Father Kolbe who volunteered his own life to save another’s. “I’m a Catholic priest” he said “I have no family, please take me instead of this poor man”. 

In a place where hope came to die, Kolbe was a beacon of selfless love. The man who was spared later said, “I could only thank him with my eyes. I could hardly grasp what was going on. I, the condemned, am to live and a stranger willingly offers his life for me. Is this a dream?”  As they slowly perished for a fortnight in the bunker, Maximilian Kolbe prayed with the living and comforted the dying. 

While others lay broken on the floor, he remained upright during inspections, greeting his tormentors with a peace they could not understand. After his life was taken from him on August 14th, his body was unceremoniously burned along with the others. A large camp officer said afterwards “The priest was a great man, we have never seen anyone like him”

The condemned prisoner, who was ransomed by Kolbe, survived Auschwitz, going on to live until he was 95 years old. He committed his life to telling the story of what that heroic man of God had done for him. In 1982 he stood with his wife, children and grandchildren in a crowd of 150,000 people in Saint Peter’s Square. Pope John Paul II canonised Father Maximillian Kolbe comparing his sacrifice to that of Jesus 2,000 years ago.

On January 27th 1945, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz uncovering a sprawling landscape of skeletal survivors, their hollow eyes hiding stories too harrowing for words. The gates were opened, but the shadows would never truly disappear.