Nobel Lecture by Kailash Satyarthi.

Nobel Lecture by Kailash Satyarthi

                                              Nobel Lecture by Kailash Satyarthi

Some outstanding extract:

"We have utterly failed in imparting an education to our children. An education that gives the meaning and objective of life and a secure future. An education that builds a sense of global citizenship among the young people."

"Solutions are not found only in the deliberations in conferences and prescriptions from a distance. They lie in small groups and local organisations and individuals, who confront the problem every day, even if they remain unrecognised and unknown to the world."

"You may ask: what can one person do? Let me tell you a story I remember from my childhood: A terrible fire had broken out in the forest. All the animals were running away, including the lion, king of the forest. Suddenly, the lion saw a tiny bird rushing towards the fire. He asked the bird, "what are you doing?” To the lion's surprise, the bird replied "I am on my way to extinguish the fire.” He laughed and said, "how can you kill the fire with just one drop of water, in your beak?” The bird was adamant, and said, "But I am doing my bit.”

Kailash Satyarthi’s Nobel Peace Prize: Decades of Fighting Child Slavery in India

Kailash Satyarthi: “The people from everywhere in the world should feel, number one, that slavery’s bad, that exploitation of children is bad, it has to go, and, secondly, they should have a belief that it is possible, it is happening, it is not that it is very pessimistic and say: oh they are poor, they are poor countries and that thing could happen. It is not true. Poor people, poor countries can bring about change, and it is happening here. So, they should have a belief that the change is possible, that we can make a better world to live in, and that will happen.”

Article from The New York Times

Oct. 10, 2014

NEW DELHI — Many years have passed, but a police chief named Amitabh Thakur can remember the precise moment when he first set eyes on Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

Mr. Satyarthi was lying on the ground, bleeding profusely from the head, while a group of men converged on him with bats and iron rods. They worked for the Great Roman Circus, which was illegally employing teenagers trafficked from Nepal as dancing girls. Mr. Satyarthi, a Gandhian activist in a simple white cotton tunic, had come to free them.

As he approached the scene, the chief realized he was interrupting a savage beating.

“I remember that when I reached this man, he was rather composed,” Mr. Thakur said. “I was very impressed, for the simple reason that a man was putting his life in danger for a noble cause.”

Mr. Satyarthi is not an international celebrity like 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, with whom he is sharing the prize. Instead, he has labored for three decades to shave away at the numbingly huge problem of child slavery in India, using undercover operatives and camera crews to find the airless workrooms and mine shafts where children were being kept.

The circus raid was a reminder of the factors that converge in favor of employers using bonded labor in India: caste differences, religious differences, political and economic leverage. About 28 million children ages 6 to 14 are working in India, according to Unicef. Mr. Satyarthi’s organization, called Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save the Children Mission, is credited with freeing some 70,000 of them. In 1994, he started Rugmark, now GoodWeave International, in which rugs are certified to have been made without child slavery.

What Destroys the Human Being?

Mahatma Gandhi was asked: what are the factors that can destroy the human being?

This is what he actually replied:

There are seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice.

“Life has shown me that people are courteous if I am courteous; people are sad if I am sad; people love me if I love them; people are mean if I hate them; people smile if I smile; people scowl if I am scowling; that the world is happy if I am happy; that people get mad if I am mad; that people are grateful if I show gratitude. Life is like a mirror; if I smile, the mirror returns the smile. The same attitude I have towards life is what life will have towards me.

“He who wishes to be loved, must love first.”

Mandela (1918–2013): A Man Committed to Transforming Society

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

Extract from article. Bob Herbert. 2013. Jacobin Magazine. A critique of the “feel good” and “sentimental stick figure” misrepresentations of Nelson Mandela and Dr. King in mass media.

Mandela was an authentic revolutionary who refused to cower in the face of the most malignant of evils.

The tributes after his death would be pouring in immediately from around the world but most of them would try to do to Mandela what has been done to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: turn him into a lovable, platitudinous cardboard character whose commitment to peace and willingness to embrace enemies could make everybody feel good. This practice is a deliberate misreading of history guaranteed to miss the point of the man.

The primary significance of Mandela and King was not their willingness to lock arms or hold hands with their enemies. It was their unshakable resolve to do whatever was necessary to bring those enemies to their knees. Their goal was nothing short of freeing their people from the murderous yoke of racial oppression. They were not the sweet, empty, inoffensive personalities of ad agencies or greeting cards or public service messages. Mandela and King were firebrands, liberators, truth-tellers—above all they were warriors. That they weren’t haters doesn’t for a moment minimize the fierceness of their militancy.

Ronald Reagan denounced him as a terrorist and Dick Cheney opposed his release from prison King was hounded by the FBI, repeatedly jailed, vilified by any number of establishment figures who despised his direct action tactics, and finally murdered. He was only 39 when he died. When King spoke out against the Vietnam war, characterizing the American government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” the New York Times took him to task in an editorial headlined, “Dr. King’s Error.”

Converting a Public Park into a Night School and Teaching Impoverished Children for the Last 25 Years for Free

At individual level, we often think that a single person can’t do any good for society, particularly at large scale level – that too with no external moral and physical support, inspiration and funding. However, there are people in this world who achieve the glory that hundreds of others can’t reach together.

Master Ayub, one of those extraordinary examples, has been teaching un-privileged and poor children of Islamabad, Pakistan for last 25 years without receiving a single penny.

Converting a Public Park in Islamabad into a Night School, he has been able to teach these young children who will one day be the backbone of Pakistan.

“If Master Ayub leaves, no one will ever teach us again. He gets us books, stationary and teaches us everything,” Shahzeb, a seven-year-old student, said.

Many of these children are forced to work. Yet, every evening more than 100  children gather in a park to learn, to get education.

Master Ayub has his own levels for grades. Syllabus of this school may not equalize the outer world’s standards, but graduates of his school can easily read, write, do complex calculations, even they can speak foreign languages (such as English).

Students are taught special courses, for instance Mathematics, Social Sciences, to meet professional requirements and real life implications of studies.

Some of the children he has taught are now working in government institutions like the Capital Development Authority (CDA) while others are running their own private businesses.

Each student praised Master Ayub and said if it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t even know how to spell their names.

Gino Bartali, Italian Cycling Legend, Saved Jews During WWII

Bartali’s decision to act was heroic not because he felt no fear but rather because he did not let his fear prevent him from doing what he felt was ethically right. 

Gino Bartli is best known as a cycling legend who holds the record for the longest time span between victories at the Tour de France –ten years– a feat made all the more impressive by the Tour’s status as one of most grueling endurance competitions in the world and the fact that Bartali was an old man (by cycling standards) when he made his comeback in 1948. Looking beyond the marvel of his athletic stamina, Bartali’s life provides a powerful lesson in how moral endurance can empower from within.

Born in a poor town near Florence in 1914, Bartali grew up in a world of grinding poverty. Day laborers like his father earned the modern equivalent of about a dollar an hour, and the average male life expectancy was forty years old, due to diseases like malaria and pneumonia. With few career options, Bartali dedicated himself to cycling: from sunrise to sunset, he rode around the Tuscan hills and built up his physical endurance –his capacity to confront painful fatigue and pedal through it. Bartali’s relentless training paid off, and he made a meteoric rise in the cycling world, turning professional only a few years after his first race.

Then cycling took the one person dearest to him.

Life and Legacy of Cesar Chavez

Lesson Plan: LIFE AND LEGACY OF CÉSAR CHÁVEZ

COMPLETE THE STORY: Fill in the blanks using words from the word bank.

BOYCOTT       CAMPS        CIVIL RIGHTS        DOLORES HUERTA     
FARM         GRAPE        NONVIOLENT        LABOR UNION     
MIGRANT        SACRAMENTO        STRIKES      
UNITED FARM WORKERS                       GANDHI

César Chávez was an activist who worked to improve the lives of ……………….…………………. workers. He knew about the problems these people faced because he was a ……………………………..……. worker from the time he was a teenager. Forced to leave school and work after his father was injured, César moved around the country harvesting seasonal crops. Migrant workers often had to live in government …………………….……………. without clean water or bathrooms and they didn’t make much money.

Chávez returned to field work after serving in the military and became the leader of a Latino-

American group. With the help of …………………………………….…….. he founded the National Farm Workers Association, a ………………………………….. that sought to improve wages and working conditions for its members.

The ………………………………….. tactics Chávez used to accomplish his goals were inspired by …………………………………… These tactics included ……………………………………, boycotts and protest marches. In 1965, the National Farm Workers Association joined with striking ……………………………………. pickers in California. Chávez organized a protest march on …………………………………….., California's capital. He convinced millions of Americans to ……………………………………… grapes in support of the workers. When the strike finally ended in 1970, the workers had achieved their goal of improved working conditions. Other farm workers across the country formed unions and held ·strikes. Several unions eventually joined together to form the ……………………………………, which still exists today.

Chávez continued to work for farm workers' rights until his death in 1993. Today his birthday is celebrated as a holiday in eight states.

See the Video about César Chávez's Life, answer the questions below and debate:

Indian Man Offers Underprivileged Children Free Education under a Bridge

A torn rug to sit on, a metro bridge for a roof, a patch of wall painted black for a blackboard and a shopkeeper for a teacher. This may look like a scene out of a Hindi movie but is the everyday reality of 39 children from villages near the Yamuna bank.

"Our teacher has told us that when poverty strikes, you should open your mind, and that can be done only through education," Abhishek, 15, a student of Sharma's now attending a government school, told the Indian Express. He aspires to be an engineer when he grows up.

Rajesh Kumar Sharma, 40, offers a free education to New Delhi's slum children under a metro bridge.

Over 30 local Indian children have been attending his open-air, dirt-floor school since it opened three years ago.

Novelist Chinua Achebe dies, aged 82

Nigerian author recognised for key role in developing African literature has died in Boston, where he was working as a professor.

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist seen by millions as the father of African literature, has died at the age of 82.

In a statement, Achebe's family requested privacy, and paid tribute to "one of the great literary voices of all time. He was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him."

A novelist, poet and essayist, Achebe was perhaps best known for his first novel Things Fall Apart, which was published in 1958. The story of the Igbo warrior Okonkwo and the colonial era, it has sold more than 10m copies around the world and has been published in 50 languages. Achebe depicts an Igbo village as the white men arrive at the end of the 19th century, taking its title from the WB Yeats poem, which continues: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

The poet Jackie Kay hailed Achebe as "the grandfather of African fiction" who "lit up a path for many others", adding that she had reread Things Fall Apart "countless times". "It is a book that keeps changing with the times as he did," she said.

Achebe won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra, was a finalist for the 1987 Booker prize for his novel Anthills of the Savannah, and in 2007 won the Man Booker international prize. Chair of the judges on that occasion, Elaine Showalter, said he had "inaugurated the modern African novel", while her fellow judge, the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, said his fiction was "an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence", and that Achebe was "a joy and an illumination to read".

'The Slum Pope? He is bigger than that – he is for all the poor people'

Jorge Mario Bergoglio during the Holy Thursday celebration held 

with poor people and drug addicts in Buenos Aires in 2008 Photo: EPA

Before becoming Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio won the hearts of the slum people ministering to the poor and sick.

THE INDEPENDENT 
FRIDAY 15 MARCH 2013

It’s a long walk down the teeming streets of Villa 31, one of several shanty-town slums within the bounds of Buenos Aires, to the “Home of Christ” sanctuary of Father Guillermo Torre. Flea-bitten dogs and children share the gutters and motorway flyovers replace the sky for the breeze-block homes jumbled beneath them.

Father Guillermo, a stocky man with a dog collar undone and askew, escorts his visitors around his domain – a church under corrugated iron, a day centre for runaways and drug addicts and, finally, the burial site of Father Carlos Mugica, a priest killed by right-wing assassins in 1974 because of his work for the poor. It isn’t Mugica we are here to celebrate today, but rather the man who until last week was merely Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

“He built of all of this,” Father Guillermo says of his friend who is now Pope Francis. While the leader of the church in this city, he helped find the money and provided the encouragement to build this and similar centres in the other slums – or Villas Miserias – in Buenos Aires. All are called “Home of Christ” and Bergoglio visited them as often as he could as part of his very public commitment to ministering to the poor.

Nowhere, not even in the other slums, is the reverence for Bergoglio more strong than here, however.

It was back in 1999 – soon after he became Archbishop of the city – that he arranged for the remains of the still iconic Father Mugica to be exhumed from the cemetery in the nearby middle class neighbourhood of Recoleta, where Evita is entombed, to this place for reburial, amongst the people he had cared and died for.

The Ideal, by Julián Gómez del Castillo

THE IDEAL

By Julián Gómez del Castillo

In Spain, most young people of 15, 18 or 25 are doomed to unemployment when they finish their studies. 60% of young people under 25 are jobless. How do educators prepare the youth for this fact, or have they chosen to be teachers and given up their job as educators? Have young people been educated to fight against this problem through a liberating moral action or to serve economic imperialism by being resigned and unresisting? Are we aware that the educational task always entails political action? Have young people and educators considered that if 60% of the youth are unemployed and do not fight, this is the result of not having had educators? It is possible that if youngsters could find militant testimonies in their family or group of friends, they would be able to lay down their lives.

We are swindling this generation by concealing from them that the Ideal is above evasion, money, exploitation in its different forms, above the good life, consumption and stupidity.

All human beings fulfill themselves by cultivating the qualities in their being. These qualities include one upon which the others converge: Love. Love is pure disinterested gratuity of self, which in our times is called solidarity, defined through actions for the poor such as "communication of what is necessary to live", that is to say, even life itself.

In the 19^th century, when the poor in Europe bring this to people’s social life, they take history’s most important cultural action for the liberation of the oppressed. Since then, thousands and thousands of people have laid down their lives in solidarity with the impoverished. It is our turn to follow suit. We are not the first ones, others have laid down their lives before but we haven’t yet. We are inspired by their attitude, which encourages us to walk. The seeds of solidarity have already been sown along the paths our Solidarity Marches will walk; paths that have witnessed great efforts and sacrifices in the name of solidarity, including the toll of many human lives.

On 16^th April, 1995, Iqbal Masih was murdered in Pakistan for fighting against child slavery. He was a fighter for peace and there was no room for him in an imperialist world. Christian conscious, he laid down his life at the age of 12. Let us honor his memory on 16^th April. He is an example for the youth of the 21^st century; a century with unemployment, hunger and slavery renewed by economic imperialism.

"A Poor Church and a Church for the Poor"

Pope Francis offered intimate insights Saturday into the moments after his election, telling journalists that he was immediately inspired to take the name of St. Francis of Assisi because of his work for peace and the poor — and that he himself would like to see "a poor church and a church for the poor."

Julián Gómez del Castillo



On 10 October, 1924, Julián Gómez del Castillo was born to a working-class family devoted to the ideal of justice in the destitute Spain. His father, following in his grandfather’s footsteps, member of that militant PSOE, died in jail at the time of the bourgeois Second Republic.

Capitalism robbed him of his childhood. At an early age he started working, he soon joined the fight for social justice, and together with his siblings and other children, were able to obtain funds for strikes. He sometimes remembered that being a child, he used to steal into the prison to take newspapers to his father.

Being young, he converted to Catholicism and was christened. Since then, fight for justice and Christian life were embodied together in him. In the Christian militancy he met Trini, a workwoman, and they joined their lives in Christian marriage. Later, they had four children and several miscarriages.

At that time, his devotion to the Christian ideal of justice materialised through the promotion of culture centres.  By the mid-40s he met Guillermo Rovirosa and the HOAC and joined the group of converts who strengthened the organisation. Together, they launched the newspaper “Tú” (“You”), which Franco decided to ban and close down. Those militants gave back hope to an absolutely dejected and humiliated working-class. Workers’ centres, courses, informative leaflets, incursion in the vertical Union…, every means was tried to take up the torch of historical solidarity among the poor again. While PSOE started their placid holidays in exile and gave up the militant promotion in Spain, Julián was mercilessly persecuted by Franquism and was even imprisoned and put under surveillance.    

F. SHAY CULLEN

FATHER SHAY CULLEN founder of the People's Recovery Empowerment and Development Assistanace  Foundation (PREDA)

Father Shay Cullen, nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize and other Human Rights Awards, is a Missionary priest from Ireland and a member of the Missionary Society of St. Columban and has worked protecting women and children and human rights in the Philippines since 1969.

Born in Dublin, 27 March 1943, educated at Presentation College, Glasthule, Co. Dublin. He completed his college education at St. Columban’s, Dalgan Park, Navan, Ireland and was ordained in April 1969. Sooner later he was assigned to parishes in Zambales and Olongapo City, Subic Bay that year.

His mission for justice and peace is open to people of all faiths. It is based on taking a stand for human rights and protecting the dignity of every person, in particular exploited women and children.

Father Shay Cullen established Preda Foundation in Olongapo city, the Philippines in 1974 to promote human rights, justice and peace. Believing that poverty, violence and child abuse are barriers to peace and give rise to extremism. He strives to eliminate child abuse and promote respect for children's rights. He works for peace by striving to change the unjust economic political and social structures and attitudes that allow such abuse. 

The twelve Preda projects (www.preda.org) are to educate for peace, free children from brothels and jails and give them a chance to recover in therapeutic homes and be reintegrated and have a happier life free from jail, brothels, abusers, traffickers, violence and abuse. His team has worked to bring the abusers to justice and has succeeded in the Philippines and in Germany to get convictions. He is a leading world-wide campaigner against trafficking and child and woman abuse. His Preda foundation operates protective therapeutic recovery shelters for the victims.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

Mahatma Gandhi's Biography

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in Porbandar, India. He became one of the most respected spiritual and political leaders of the 1900's. GandhiJi helped free the Indian people from British rule through nonviolent resistance, and is honored by Indians as the father of the Indian Nation.

The Indian people called Gandhiji  'Mahatma', meaning Great Soul. At the age of 13 Gandhi married Kasturba, a girl the same age. The Gandhis had four children. Gandhi studied law in London and returned to India in 1891 to practice. In 1893 he took on a one-year contract to do legal work in South Africa.

At the time the British controlled South Africa. When he attempted to claim his rights as a British subject he was abused, and soon saw that all Indians suffered similar treatment. Gandhi stayed in South Africa for 21 years working to secure rights for Indian people.

Korczak, Janusz [Henryk Goldszmit] (1878–1942)

Janusz Korczak was born Henryk Goldsmit in Warsaw on July 22, 1878. During his youth, he played with children who were poor and lived in bad neighborhoods; his passion for helping disadvantaged youth continued into his adulthood. He studied medicine and also had a promising career in literature.

In 1912 Korczak established a Jewish orphanage, Dom Sierot, in a building which he designed to advance his progressive educational theories. He envisioned a world in which children structured their own world and became experts in their own matters. Jewish children between the ages of seven and fourteen were allowed to live there while attending Polish public school and government-sponsored Jewish schools, known as “Sabbath” schools. The orphanage opened a summer camp in 1921, which remained in operation until the summer of 1940.

Besides serving as principal of Don Sierot and another orphanage, Nasz Dom, and working as a doctor and an author, he also worked at a Polish radio station, was a principal of an experimental school, published a children’s newspaper, and was docent at a Polish university. Korczak also served as an expert witness in a district court for minors. With the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930s his activities were restricted to Jews.

In 1934 and 1936 Korczak visited Palestine and was influenced by the kibbutz movement. Following his trips, Korczak was convinced that all Jews should move to Palestine. During the Second World War he was imprisoned for his refusal to wear the yellow star. Although offered asylum, he refused to abandon his orphans and went to the Warsaw ghetto with them. There he created a cultural centre which held literary evenings and where the children gave performances.

 

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (28-08-1963)

Martin Luther King is famous for his "I Have a Dream" speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Wednesday, August 28, 1963.

King, representing SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were: Roy Wilkins, NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). For King, this role was another which courted controversy, as he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation, but the organizers were firm that the march would proceed.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s legendary I Have a Dream Speech

Click to see the script of M.L. King's speech: I HAVE A DREAM

The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the South and a very public opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Organizers intended to excoriate and then challenge the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks, generally, in the South. However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

Maximilian Kolbe

The Holocaust is a history of enduring horror and sorrow. The charred skeletons, the diabolic experiments, the death camps, the mass graves, the smoke from the chimneys ...

Auschwitz became the killing centre during WWII where the largest numbers of the Jews were murdered. One Christian man who died here became a martyr to the truth of evils of Nazism - a true hero for our time, a saint who lived what he preached, total love toward God and man ...

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who died as prisoner 16770 in Auschwitz. When a prisoner escaped from the camp, the Nazis selected 10 others to be killed by starvation in reprisal for the escape. One of the 10 selected to die, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began to cry: My wife! My children! I will never see them again! At this Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his place. His request was granted ...

The story begins on 8 January, 1894 - Raymond Kolbe was born the second son of a poor weaver at Zdunska Wola near Lodz in Poland. In 1910 he became a Franciscan, taking the name Maximilian. He studied at Rome and was ordained in 1919. He returned to Poland and taught Church history in a seminary. He built a friary just west of Warsaw, which eventually housed 762 Franciscans and printed eleven periodicals, one with a circulation of over a million, including a daily newspaper.

In 1930 he went to Asia, where he founded friaries in Nagasaki and in India. In 1936 he was recalled to supervise the original friary near Warsaw. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he knew that the friary would be seized, and sent most of the friars home. He was imprisoned briefly and then released, and returned to the friary, where he and the other friars began to organize a shelter for 3,000 Polish refugees, among whom were 2,000 Jews. The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They housed, fed and clothed them, and brought all their machinery into use in their service.

Inevitably, the community came under suspicion and was watched closely. Then in May 1941 the friary was closed down and Maximilian and four companions were taken to the deathcamp Auschwitz, where they worked with the other prisoners. 

One day an SS officer found some of the heaviest planks he could lay hold of and personally loaded them on the Franciscan's back, ordering him to run. When he collapsed, the SS officer kicked him in the stomach and face and had his men give him fifty lashes. When the priest lost consciousness the Nazis threw him in the mud and left him for dead. But his companions managed to smuggle him to the camp infirmary - and he recovered. The doctor, Rudolph Diem, later recalled:'I can say with certainty that during my four years in Auschwitz, I never saw such a sublime example of the love of God and one's neighbor.'