#zduńska wola

[postcard-from-the-past]

Street scene in Zduńska Wola, Poland

Polish vintage postcard, mailed in 1915 to Schopfheim, Germany

[ibarbouron-us]

Hoy celebramos a San Maximiliano Kolbe, el mártir que ofreció su vida por un padre de familia.

Maximiliano María Kolbe O. F. M. Conv. (en polaco: Maksymilian Maria Kolbe [maksɨˌmʲilʲan ˌmarʲja ˈkɔlbɛ]) (Zduńska Wola, voivodato de Łódź, 8 de enero de 1894 - Auschwitz, 14 de agosto de 1941) fue un fraile franciscano conventual polaco que murió voluntariamente en lugar de Franciszek Gajowniczek en el campo alemán de concentración de Auschwitz, en la Polonia ocupada por los nazis durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Fue un activo promotor de la veneración al Inmaculado Corazón de María.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

SAINT OF THE DAY (August 14)

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan priest, missionary and martyr, is celebrated throughout the Church today, August 14.

The saint died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during World War II.

He is remembered as a “martyr of charity” for dying in place of another prisoner who had a wife and children.

He was beatified by Pope Paul VI on 17 October 1971. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 10 October 1982.

St. Maximilian is also celebrated for his missionary work, his evangelistic use of modern means of communication, and for his lifelong devotion to the Virgin Mary under her title of the Immaculate Conception.

All these aspects of St. Maximilian's life converged in his founding of the Militia Immaculata.

The worldwide organization continues St. Maximilian Kolbe's mission of bringing individuals and societies into the Catholic Church, through dedication to the Virgin Mary.

Maximilian Maria Kolbe OFM Conv. (Raymund Kolbe) was born on 8 January 1894 in Zduńska Wola, in the Kingdom of Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire.

He was the second son of weaver Julius Kolbe and midwife Maria Dąbrowska.

His father was an ethnic German, and his mother was Polish. He had four brothers.

St. Maximilian, according to several biographies, was personally called by the Virgin Mary, both to his holy life and to his eventual martyrdom.

As an impulsive and badly-behaved child, he prayed to her for guidance and later described how she miraculously appeared to him holding two crowns: one was white, representing purity, the other red, for martyrdom.

When he was asked to choose between these two destinies, the troublesome child and future saint said he wanted both.

Radically changed by the incident, he entered the minor seminary of the Conventual Franciscans in 1907 at age 13.

At age 20, he made his solemn vows as a Franciscan, earning a doctorate in philosophy the next year.

Soon after, however, he developed chronic tuberculosis, which eventually destroyed one of his lungs and weakened the other.

On 16 October 1917, in response to anti-Catholic demonstrations by Italian Freemasons, Friar Maximilian led six other Franciscans in Rome to form the association they called the Militia Immaculata.

The group's founding coincided almost exactly with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the Marian apparitions at Fatima, Portugal.

As a Franciscan priest, Fr. Maximilian returned to work in Poland during the 1920s.

There, he promoted the Catholic faith through newspapers and magazines, which eventually reached an extraordinary circulation, published from a monastery so large it was called the “City of the Immaculata.”

In 1930, he moved to Japan and had established a Japanese Catholic press by 1936, along with a similarly ambitious monastery.

That year, however, he returned to Poland for the last time.

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland and Fr. Kolbe was arrested.

Briefly freed during 1940, he published one last issue of the Knight of the Immaculata before his final arrest and transportation to Auschwitz in 1941.

At the beginning of August that year, 10 prisoners were sentenced to death by starvation in punishment for another inmate's escape.

Moved by one man's lamentation for his wife and children, Fr. Kolbe volunteered to die in his place.

Survivors of the camp testified that the starving prisoners could be heard praying and singing hymns, led by the priest who had volunteered for an agonizing death.

After two weeks, on the night before the Church's feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the camp officials decided to hasten Fr. Kolbe's death, injecting him with carbolic acid.

He died on 14 August 1941. His body was cremated by the camp officials on the feast of the Assumption.

He had stated years earlier:

“I would like to be reduced to ashes for the cause of the Immaculata, and may this dust be carried over the whole world so that nothing would remain.”

St. Maximilian Kolbe is considered a patron of journalists, families, prisoners, the pro-life movement, the chemically addicted, and those with eating disorders.

[pszemek-z-sieradza]

Zdw

[vhshell]

Wypożyczalnia kaset video w Zduńskiej Woli, pierwsza połowa lat 90.

[wojciech-kac]

Wszywka alkoholowa Esperal Sieradz - Zduńska Wola - Łask

[cruger2984]

THE DESCRIPTION OF SAINT MAXIMILIAN KOLBE The Knight of the Immaculata and the Martyr of Auschwitz Feast Day: August 14

"Without sacrifice, there is no love."

The martyr of Auschwitz and the patron of political prisoners and invoked against drug addiction, was born Raymund Kolbe, in Zduńska Wola, Congress Poland, Russian Empire on January 8, 1894. He was the second son of weaver Julius Kolbe and midwife Maria Dąbrowska. His father was an ethnic German, and his mother was Polish. He had four brothers. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Pabianice. In 1906, when he was 12 years old, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him asking to choose between the two crowns in her hands. One was white, symbolizing purity; the other red, symbolizing martyrdom. Maximillian answered: 'I choose both.'

After entering the Order of Friars Minor Conventual (Conventual Franciscans) with his elder brother Francis in 1907, and both enrolled at the Conventual Franciscan minor seminary in Lwow later that year, he went to Rome to complete his theological studies. In 1910, Kolbe was allowed to enter the novitiate, where he chose a religious name Maximilian. He professed his first vows in 1911, and final vows in 1914, adopting the additional name of Maria (Mary). In 1917, one year before his ordination, he founded and organized the Militia Immaculatae (Army of the Immaculate One), to work for conversion of sinners and enemies of the Catholic church, specifically the Freemasons, through the Blessed Virgin Mary's intercession.

Maximilian ordained a priest in 1918. The following year in July, he returned to Poland, which was newly independent (Second Polish Republic). He was active in promoting the veneration of the Immaculate Virgin Mary. He was strongly opposed to leftist – in particular, communist – movements. From 1919 to 1922, he taught at the Kraków Seminary. Around that time, as well as earlier in Rome, he suffered from tuberculosis, which forced him to take a lengthy leave of absence from his teaching duties. In those pre-antibiotic times, TB was generally considered fatal, with rest and good nutrition the best treatment.

He founded the monthly periodical Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculata) in January 1922, a devotional publication based on French Le Messager du Coeur de Jesus (Messenger of the Heart of Jesus). From 1922 to 1926, he operated a religious publishing press in Grodno. As his activities grew in scope, in 1927 he founded a new Conventual Franciscan monastery at Niepokalanów near Warsaw. It became a major religious publishing centre, and a junior seminary was opened there two years later. 

He undertook a series of missions to East Asia. He arrived first in Shanghai, China, but failed to gather a following there. Next he moved to Japan, where by 1931 he had founded a Franciscan monastery, Mugenzai no Sono, on the outskirts of Nagasaki. Kolbe had started publishing a Japanese edition of the Knight of the Immaculata (Seibo no Kishi: 聖母の騎士). The monastery he founded remains prominent in the Roman Catholic Church in Japan. He had the monastery built on a mountainside, and according to Shinto beliefs, this was not the side best suited to be in harmony with nature. Later, when the American forces dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Kolbe's monastery was saved, unlike the Immaculate Conception Cathedral (Urakami Cathedral), because the blast of the bomb hit the other side of the mountain, which took the main force of the blast. Had Kolbe built the monastery on the preferred side of the mountain, as he was advised, his work and all of his fellow monks would have been destroyed. Fr. Kolbe also entered into dialogue with local Buddhist priests, and some of them became friends.

Meanwhile, in his absence the monastery at Niepokalanów began to publish a daily newspaper Mały Dziennik (the Small Diary), in alliance with the political group National Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo Radykalny). This publication reached a circulation of 137,000, and nearly double that, 225,000, on weekends. Kolbe returned to Poland in 1933 for a general chapter of the order in Kraków.

In 1930, Maximillian went for a few years in Japan, until called back to attend the Provincial Chapter in Poland in 1936. There he was appointed guardian of Niepokalanów, thus precluding his return to Japan. Two years later, in 1938, he started a radio station at Niepokalanów, Radio Niepokalanów. He held an amateur radio licence, with the call sign SP3RN.

When the Second World War broke out, Fr. Kolbe worked actively to support the Jewish refugees, and was one of the few friars who remained in the monastery, where he organized a temporary hospital. After the town was captured by the Germans, he was discovered on September 19, 1939; he was later released on December 8. Fr. Kolbe refused to sign the Deutsche Volksliste, which would have given him rights similar to those of German citizens in exchange for recognizing his ethnic German ancestry. Upon his release he continued work at his friary where he and other friars provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from German persecution in the Niepokalanów friary. Kolbe received permission to continue publishing religious works, though significantly reduced in scope. The monastery continued to act as a publishing house, issuing a number of anti-Nazi German publications.

After the monastery was shut down by the German authorities, Fr. Kolbe and four others were arrested on February 17, 1941, by the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. He was transferred to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp on May 28, as 'Prisoner 16670'. Continuing to act as a priest, he was subjected to violent harassment, including beatings and lashings. Once he was smuggled to a prison hospital by friendly inmates.

On July 31, in reprisal for a prisoner's escape, the deputy camp commander, SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, randomly picked men were to die in the starvation cell to deter further escape attempts. Fr. Kolbe offered himself in place of one of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, a father of two children. According to an eyewitness, who was an assistant janitor at that time, in his prison cell Kolbe led the prisoners in prayer. Each time the guards checked on him, he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. After they had been starved and deprived of water for two weeks, only Kolbe remained alive.

The guards wanted the bunker emptied, and on August 14, 1941 at Auschwitz-Birkenau - the vigil of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, after being starved for two weeks, Fr. Kolbe was executed with a carbolic acid injection. He died at the age of 47, receiving the crown of martyrdom, and serenely with the name of the Blessed Mother on his lips.

Beatified by Pope Paul VI on October 17, 1971 and canonized a saint eleven years later by St. John Paul II on October 10, 1982, his major shrine can be found at the Basilica of the Omni-mediatress of All Glories in Niepokalanów, under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Warsaw.

"O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee. And for all those who do not have recourse to thee; especially the Freemasons and all those recommended to thee." -his quote about this goal that he added to the Miraculous Medal prayer

[aniamajewska]

Lost & found - pre production

2 March 2021

RESEARCH 4

Dariusz Klimczak was born in Sieradz, Poland, in 1967. He graduated from art school in Zduńska Wola, Poland. Contemporary artist, a painter, journalist, drummer in a rock band and photographer. He has been associated with photography for 30 years. Started with analogue camera, he creates amazing surreal images today using digital camera and Photoshop. 

His works are extremely intriguing, and the dreamlike paintings stay in the memory for a long time, recalling the surreal works of the great masters of painting (Salvador Dali, Zdzislaw Beksinski). On the basis of symbols and pictorial archetypes, he tries to create his own worlds, tell stories, and give the viewer the beginning of a fairy tale, or at least to make someone reflect or smile. The artist prefers square frames and the contrast of black and white, although he also does not shy away from colour. In his photo manipulation he looks for moods, anecdotes and universal symbols.

Dariusz has over a dozen individual exhibitions (including two foreign ones) and participation in several international exhibitions. He sells limited editions of large-format prints all over the world, from the USA to Australia. 

This image title is “Zamknięty krajobraz”, which translated exactly means “Closed Landscape”. I can relate myself personal to this image. Beautiful landscape of the desert in black and white, which I really love and enjoy the view, but it closed. The composition of this image is based on a repeating pattern like most of Dariusz images. The highlights on padlocks edges depicts the light comes from the left. Everywhere I look at the scene there is a huge padlock, that locks me up from seeing. That’s how I feel in these days. Locked down at home. This image looks for me like a mountains landscape. I can’t go out to the mountains. Mountains are closed. I feel the overwhelming emptiness and loneliness. 

https://www.kwadrart.com

[pszemek-z-sieradza]

Dziadek - farmer z Sikucina - na Zetorze, gdy swe pole już zaorze,

swoją babkę - też farmerkę

chętko, prędko, po obiedzie

na przejażdżkę bierze 

i w przyczepie przez wieś wiezie