Auschwitz And A Missing Prisoner

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It's July 1941. Aushewitz. Nighttime roll call, and something's gone wrong. A man's missing. Gone. Escaped, maybe. Nobody knows. So the camp does what the camp does. The commandant picks ten men. Any ten, doesn't matter who. They're going in the starvation bunker. No food, no water until they're dead. It's a warning to everyone else left standing. One of the ten is a sergeant, a husband, a father, and when his number gets called, he breaks. Right there in the yard. My wife, he says. My children, I'll never see them again. Nobody moves. Nobody's allowed to move. Except one man does. A prisoner steps out of line and walks straight toward the commandant. That's not a thing anyone does in that camp. Not once, without a bullet waiting for them anyway. And he asks to die instead. Stick around to the end of this one, because a man who broke down in that yard, he didn't die in that camp. He lived another 53 years. And what he did with those 53 years is the real ending to this story.

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Whoever holds the bridge holds the battlefield. Winning the bridge is the high ground, the one advantage that turns an impossible fight. Every saint found theirs. Every hero of the faith found theirs. A habit of prayer, an act of courage, a truth they finally stopped running from. And the battle you're standing in right now, your faith, your family, your work, it has a bridge too. There's never been a time like this one. A time for ordinary men and women fighting the good fight to find that high ground and take it. Now is the time to win your bridge. And here's your host, not a saint, not a scholar, a brother in the trenches beside you, a navy veteran, a husband, a father, the founder of Uptime Ministries and the Winning the Bridge podcast, Gabriel.

Kolbe’s Ordinary Life Before War

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The man who stepped out of that line is Maximilien Colby. And before you picture some fearless action movie priest, please don't. For most of his life, Colby's whole story is a guy running a printing press. Polish, Franciscan, ordained in his early 20s, sickly for most of his life, tuberculosis wrecked his lungs more than once, and more than one doctor figured he wouldn't see 40. What he actually did with his life? He built a magazine. Then a printing operation, then an entire town built around that printing operation. A friary called Nypoca La Nuf. Let me try again. Which, by the late 1930s, was the largest Franciscan community on the planet. Hundreds of friars, presses running around the clock, a newspaper reaching close to a million readers a month. Eventually, get this. A radio station too. None of that sounds like martyrdom. It sounds like running a media company, which honestly it kind of was. Then 1939 happens. Germany invades Poland. The Gestapo shuts the whole operation down, arrests Kolby, lets him go, and arrests him again. By 1941, he's an Auschwitz prisoner 16670, stripped of the name Maximilian, the collar, all of it. Just a number and a set of stripes, same as everybody else in that camp. That's the battlefield. Not one he built, one that got built around him. The presses are gone. The town he founded is gone. Twenty years of work gone. All that's left is a starving, sick, anonymous prisoner in the worst place on earth. Which is exactly the moment a man is supposed to fold. Look out for himself. Go quiet, go small. Try to survive one more day. But Colby does the opposite. Here's the thing about Colby, he actually won two bridges. And

Two Bridges And One Decision

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the first one is that um first one that made the second one possible. Bridge number one, mastering the newest tools of his day for the oldest message there is. He didn't see printing presses and radio waves as beneath a priest's calling. He saw them as the whole game. If people are getting their information from a newspaper instead of a pulpit now, fine. Go build the best darn newspaper you can and put the gospel in it. Bridge number two. The one that actually matters when we say winning the bridge is smaller. And it happens in about 10 seconds. It's the moment a Nazi commandant is standing in a prison yard surrounded by armed guards in a place where stepping out of line gets you shot on the spot. And Colby steps out of line anyway. Five words. I am a Catholic priest. Then I wish to take his place. That's the bridge. Not the printing press. That was practice. The bridge is the willingness to trade his own life for a stranger's on command. With zero time to think it over. Here's the part that should change how you think about this story. That moment in the yard wasn't a lightning bolt out of nowhere. Colby didn't have some once-in-a-lifetime surge of courage that came from nothing. The natural tactic, the skill he'd been building for 20 years, was surrender in small doses, over and over until it was just how he operated. Every building project that fell through, every year his lungs nearly killed him, every plan the Nazis shut down, he'd practiced, letting go of control thousands of times before that yard. The supernatural advantage underneath it? Total specific devotion to Mary. Colby didn't just carry a general kind of faith around. He founded an entire movement around consecrating himself completely to her, holding nothing back for himself. Every choice he made, four years, ran through that filter first. So when the moment actually came, the one moment in his whole life where thinking too long meant staying in line and staying alive, there wasn't a decision left to make. He'd already made it 10,000 times in smaller rooms long before that yard. And once he steps out of line, the tide turns fast. They throw him and nine other condemned men into an underground starvation bunker. No food, no water. Here's what the guards report back. Instead of screaming and fighting, you'd expect from starving men, they hear singing hymns coming from the bunker day after day. Two weeks in, Colby's the last one still alive. The guards get fed up with it, with all the singing, right? So they finish him with a lethal injection. August 14th, 1941. The day before the feast of the Assumption. A whole life pointed at Mary, ending the day before her feast.

The Practice Of Small Surrenders

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One concrete move. Here's the move for you this week. And I want you to actually sit with this instead of nodding along. Colby's yard moment wasn't spontaneous. It was compound interest. Ten thousand small surrenders cashed in all at once in ten seconds. When it counted. So, what's the small surrender you're avoiding this week? Not the big dramatic one, but the small one. The apology you owe somebody, the habit you know you should drop, the moment we're saying, yes, take it, I'll go without cost you something real, but small. Do that one this week. That's the whole assignment. You're not building toward some future heroic moment by thinking about heroism. You build toward it by practicing the small trade-off over and over until it's just how you operate.

Pier Giorgio’s Quiet Version

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I've got a quick story. A second one here, worth hearing. An opposite version of the same move Colby made earlier with his media empire. Colby won this bridge by going as loud and public as he possibly could. A printing empire, a radio station, close to a million readers, broadcast, broadcast, broadcast. Now, blessed Pier Giorgio Frossati won the exact same bridge, the opposite way. Wealthy Italian family, his father owned one of the biggest newspapers in the country, and Pier Giorgio spent his short life quietly giving nearly everything away. His bus fare, gone. His coat, gone. In the middle of winter, he'd get home and just say he'd walk the whole way. His own family had no idea how much money or how much he gave away until he died at 24. The poor of Turin flooded the streets for his funeral. Thousands of people his own parents had never even heard of. One man broadcast the message to over a million people, one man hid it from the five people closest to him. Same surrender underneath, same bridge, two completely different banks. So which bank are you standing on or nearest to?

The Question That Names Your Bridge

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Alright, let's ask it. The big question every single week. What's the bridge you're standing before? Now remember what we mean by that. The bridge isn't the thing in your way, it's the advantage that one move once you take it turns the whole fight. So knowing that, what's the one move that wins it for you? And what's the fruit on the other side? Don't answer me. Answer him. You know who. And make the move this week. Remember the guy from the top of the episode? The sergeant who broke down in the yard, the one Colby stepped forward to save? His name was, and bear with me for a second, Francisek Gojovnichek. And here's the part almost nobody knows. He survived, he made it out of Auschwitz, alive, made it through the rest of the war, got reunited with his wife, and 41 years later, in 1982, he's standing in St. Peter's Square in Rome, watching Pope John Paul II declare the man who died in his place a saint. And after making it out of Auschwitz, he spent the next several decades doing one thing, telling anybody who'd listen about the priest who traded places with him in a Nazi prison yard. One act, ten seconds long, told and retold for 50 years by the one man alive who owed the whole second half of his life to it. That's a bridge that doesn't stop paying out.

The Man Who Lived And Told It

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That's the bridge for today. If this one hit home in any way, do these three things. First, follow the show wherever you're listening. Second, leave a rating on Apple or Spotify. It's how other soldiers fighting the good fight find us. And lastly, share this episode with someone standing in front of a battle of their own. Uptime Ministries makes this show possible, so lock arms with us and be part of the mission at Uptime Ministries.com. We would love to meet you. Until next time, Vince Pontum Tuum. Win your bridge.