Today marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a day Catholics often think of in mourning, remembering the millions who lost their lives in the horrors of the Holocaust. 

We also think of St. Maximilian Kolbe, given his selfless Catholic witness. 

Offering his own life in the place of another prisoner who had a wife and children, the Catholic priest clung to prayer and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. 

The guard allowed the exchange. Prisoner No. 16770, Father Maximilian Kolbe, lived for another 15 days in a starvation cell located inside Block 11, enduring beatings and torment at the hands of SS guards. Despite this ongoing anguish, survivors of the camp share memories of the starving prisoners praying and singing hymns, all led by the one priest who had volunteered to die. Father Kolbe died from a lethal injection of carbolic acid on Aug. 14, 1941. He was 47 years old.

Holding on to prayer especially during the torrents of war is the subject of a new book by Emily Compagno, Under His Wings. The author and Fox News talk-show host provides detailed accounts of men and women who cling to God amidst the grief and anguish of time in battle. 

Compagno has heard stories of World War II all her life in a very personal way, with much of her family serving in the military. Her great-great-aunt Lt. Luella Cochran was a nurse on the front lines during the war, joining the Greatest Generation in battle and prayer. 

As Compagno writes in her book, her great-great-aunt took her Catholic faith very seriously; as she noted in her first letter home to her family, she “went to Communion last Sunday, yesterday and will go tomorrow. So don’t worry. All is well.”

Cochran grew up understanding the realities of war, having lost her older brother, Pfc. Joseph Lorenz, during World War I. However, this experience didn’t deter her from enlisting to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in July 1943. While she served, her husband did, too — and at one point, nine of her family members were serving in the war. As a nurse, she was stationed in many parts of Europe, including Germany, Britain and France — 

Writing home on March 28, 1945, from northern France, three months after the liberation of Auschwitz, Cochran recounted: 

“Today we march to the little Catholic church across the bridge which it is said we one time bombed, where memorial services were being held for French and American prisoners. The padre then, still in his vestments, led the procession, the parishioners and us coming in the rear, up and up a mountainside until we were just about winded.”

The priest stopped at a clearing, and the group gathered around 15 graves, she wrote, “all soldiers, 13 French, one RAF, and one unknown. Requiem was sung then a wreath laid,” while people spread flowers onto the graves. 

Cochran continued: 

“We were told today that we Americans had come in and rescued the town just in time to save a goodly number of Frenchmen whom the Germans were going to behead in front of the church. For this reason, they hold no grudge against us for the damage we did here.”

It's this pivotal experience that led the Army nurse to try and find the resting place of her older brother, who was evacuated to a base hospital and endured an amputation but died on Nov. 21, 1918. Asking her family where he might be, she added, “I seem so close and yet because I can’t get to the cemetery; I feel so far away ...”

A family decision was made to have him laid to rest in France alongside his compatriots. Cochran did ultimately make it to his grave, kneeling to pray for his eternal repose, as Compagno shares in her book: 

“Luella was able to visit Joseph’s final resting place in the Suresnes American Cemetery twice while she was deployed, paying her respects and telling her little brother how deeply she missed him.”

And this is just one story of several fleshed out by Compagno, who related to the Register her own visits to military bases during recent wars — and how she felt compelled to share these stories that are often forgotten: 

“It has been my utmost honor to serve as a messenger for the profound stories of the warriors within this very special book. These American heroes remind us how multifaceted service is; how honorable and exceptional our warriors are; and how utterly and selflessly they — and their families — fulfill duty.”

Written with historical analysis and pulsating accuracy, Compagno allows readers to live through harrowing accounts of priests, chaplains, lieutenants and servicemen and women who all rely on their relationship with God to persevere. 

“Their breathtaking accounts remind readers how simple and magnificent God’s love is for us,” Compagno told the Register, “and of the only Savior that can lighten the heavy burdens warfighters carry.” 

Raised Catholic, the Fox News host currently identifies as a Christian, and she has spoken out about her own faith in her reporting. In spring 2022, when Supreme Court justices were being threatened outside their homes by pro-abortion activists in the wake of the Dobbs leak, proudly harkening back to her Catholic roots, she said: 

“As a Catholic, this breaks my heart. As a human, this breaks my heart. As a citizen of this United States, it is preposterous that the White House speaker is declining to condemn any calls for violence, that she is refusing to condemn the calls to protest at Supreme Court justices’ personal homes.”

On this 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, as we recall the millions who were brutally killed by the Nazis and those who lost their lives fighting in and aiding the cause of World War II, may we delve a little deeper into these living histories of brave men and women who fought heroically — and, often, in the end, paid the ultimate sacrifice. 

As Pope St. Paul VI beatified Father Kolbe on Oct. 17, 1971, the Pope recalled Father Kolbe’s tragic departure from this world, saying, “Over this immense vestibule of death hovers a divine and imperishable word of life, that of Jesus revealing the secret of innocent suffering: to be the expiation, the victim, the burnt sacrifice and, above all, to be love for others.”

As the witness of St. Maximilian showed: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).