Maximilian Kolbe was forty-five years old in the early autumn of 1939 when the Nazis invaded his homeland.  He was a Polish friar in Niepokalanow, a village near Warsaw.  There, 762 priests and lay brothers lived in the largest friary in the world.  Father Kolbe presided over Niepokalanow with a combination of industry, joy, love, and humor that made him beloved by the plainspoken brethren there. In his simple room, he sat each morning at a pigeonhole desk, a large globe before him, praying over the world.  He did so, tortured by the fact that a pale man with arresting blue eyes and a terrifying power of manipulation had whipped the people of Germany into a frenzy.  Whole nations had already fallen to the evil Adolf Hitler and his [...]