This month of Easter, is a fitting moment to reflect on some Christian figures persecuted during WW2, who later came to be venerated as saints by the church. These men and women faced persecution, imprisonment, torture, and ultimately death with an unwavering clarity of conscience.
But the biographies of these saints are neither distant nor adorned with the fantastical flourishes so common in medieval hagiography. We can walk in their footsteps and visit the cities, camps, and prisons where their sorrowful stories unfolded.
Join us as we explore the lives of Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, and Titus Brandsma. (If you are travelling in Poland and wish to explore some of the sites mentioned in this blog, please consider booking a Customisable Tour with Poland at War Tours.)
Saint Maximilian Kolbe: Martyr of Auschwitz
In the summer of 1941, inside the brutal camp of Auschwitz, one man stepped forward when another had been condemned to die.
Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar and writer, had already endured months of forced labour and beatings. When a prisoner escaped, the Nazis selected ten men to be staved to death in retaliation. One of those selected, Franciszek Gajowniczek, a husband and father, cried out in despair. Kolbe volunteered to take his place.
He was led to the starvation bunker, where he spent his final days alongside the others, offering prayers and comfort. Witnesses later recalled that the cell, meant to be a place of agony, became strangely peaceful. After two weeks of starvation, he was killed by an injection of carbolic acid – the merciless camp guards wanting to free up the cells for new inmates.
In a place designed to strip away humanity, Maximilian Kolbe chose to affirm it. His canonisation in 1982 recognised not only his ultimate sacrifice, but the moral clarity behind it – the belief that even in the darkest circumstances, love and selflessness remained a choice.
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
Edith Stein’s life embodied the complexity of 20th-century Europe itself. Born into a Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), Lower Silesia, she became a philosopher of great promise before converting to Catholicism and entering a Carmelite convent.
Due to the growing threat posed by Nazism in Germany, Stein and her sister (also a Catholic convert) were transferred to a monastery in the Netherlands. But even before the Nazi occupation reached the Netherlands, Stein sensed what lay ahead. She confided to her prioress that she did not expect to survive the war, and she quietly prepared for what she believed was inevitable. Fellow sisters later recalled how, after the German invasion in May 1940, she began to accustom herself to hardship, enduring cold and hunger as if training for life in a concentration camp.
For a time, the Netherlands offered a fragile sense of safety. That illusion was shattered in July 1942, when the Dutch bishops publicly condemned Nazi racism. The response was swift. In retaliation, the German authorities ordered the arrest of Jewish converts to Christianity, who until then had been spared deportation.
On 2 August 1942, Edith Stein – now Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – was arrested by the SS, along with her sister Rosa. They were taken first to the camps at Amersfoort and Westerbork. At Westerbork, one official, struck by her calm faith and composure, offered her a chance to escape. She refused. To accept would mean abandoning those she saw as her people. She insisted that to be separated from them at that moment would be unthinkable.
A few days later, on 7 August, she and nearly a thousand others were deported to Auschwitz. Within days of arrival, likely on 9 August 1942, Edith Stein, her sister, and many others were murdered in the gas chambers at Birkenau.
Her death there represents one of the most profound intersections of identity and persecution in the war. Stein has been remembered as both a Jewish victim of the Holocaust and a Christian martyr, her life embodying the fractured reality of Europe under Nazi rule. She stands as a reminder of how individual lives so often defy the boundaries that ideologies try to place on them. Stein was canonised in 1998.
In Poland, Stein’s memory is preserved in several meaningful places. In Lubliniec, the Muzeum Pro Memoria Edith Stein is located on the first floor of the Courant family home, once belonging to her grandparents. In Wrocław, visitors can explore the Edith Stein House, situated in the building her mother purchased for the family in 1919 ( then known as Michaelisstrasse 38, now Nowowiejska 38).
Saint Titus Brandsma: Voice Against Propaganda
In the Netherlands, resistance took many forms. For Titus Brandsma, a Carmelite priest and journalist, it meant confronting the machinery of propaganda.
As the Nazis tightened their control over public life, they sought to dominate the press. Brandsma spoke out, urging Catholic newspapers to resist publishing Nazi material. He understood that truth itself was under attack, and that silence would allow lies to flourish unchecked.
His stance led to his arrest in 1942. After a period of imprisonment, he was deported to Dachau, where he endured forced labour. Despite the suffering, he remained known for his kindness, even toward those who guarded him.
He was executed by lethal injection on 26 July of that year by the Allgemeine SS, as part of their medical experiments on camp prisoners.
Brandsma was beatified in November 1985 by Pope John Paul II, and canonised in May 2022 by Pope Francis. He is remembered for his refusal to lend legitimacy to a regime built on deception. In an environment where telling the truth could lead to an individual’s imprisonment and death, Brandsma chose to speak it anyway.
The Blesseds of World War II
While only a small number of individuals from this period have been canonised as saints, many more have been recognised as “Blesseds,” martyrs whose lives reflected the same courage and moral conviction.
In Poland alone, 108 men and women were beatified in 1999. They included priests, nuns, and laypeople, each caught in the machinery of occupation and terror. Some were executed for aiding Jews. Others were imprisoned for refusing to collaborate. Many died in camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau.
Among these martyrs was Marianna Biernacka, a grandmother from eastern Poland, who offered her life in place of her pregnant daughter-in-law. She was executed by the Nazis, her act echoing the same selflessness seen in Kolbe’s sacrifice.
The Poznań Five also count among the “Blessed”. These five young men (the oldest was 23) were arrested for being leaders of Catholic youth, and suspected of sowing resistance to the Nazi regime. After spending time imprisoned in Poznań, Wronki, Berlin, Zwicka, the five were guillotined in Dresden. Their sentence: high treason as traitors to the Third Reich.
In a world where cruelty and murder had been normalised, these men and women chose to remain true to their moral understanding of the world. That choice, made in the most extreme conditions imaginable, is what set them apart and remains so inspiring to this day. Nazism and Communism could strip away possessions, livelihoods, and freedom, but they could not despoil the human conscience.
If you are going to be visiting Poland this year, please consider a Day Tour or Multi-Day History Tour with us.
