God's love amid Nazi horror

One of the inmates at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz was a priest named Maximilian Kolbe. After a prisoner was thought to have escaped, the guards selected ten men to die in a starvation bunker in order to teach the remaining prisoners a lesson. The guards began to drag away a man named Franciszek, who dug his heels into the mud on the ground as he cried out, “My poor wife! My poor children!” At that moment, Fr. Kolbe stepped forward and said, “I am a Catholic priest. Let me take his place. I am old. He has a wife and children.”

The guards allowed Fr. Kolbe to take Franciszek’s place, and over the next two weeks he comforted the other men who had been sentenced to die. Whenever the guards looked into his cell, Fr. Kolbe was either standing or kneeling in prayer. After all the other prisoners had died, the guards did not wait for Fr. Kolbe to starve to death. They instead injected his left arm with carbolic acid and later cremated his remains.

Trent Horn

Was this an example of evil that proves God does not exist?

The fact that what the Nazis did was objectively wrong proves there is a universal standard for morality that comes from a universal source of goodness, or God. Morality can’t just be a survival mechanism that humans developed through the process of evolution, because some people feel compelled to do things that don’t help our survival, like giving their life for a stranger. If we are all made in God’s image, however, then that explains our desire to fight and even die for the dignity of someone else. In fact, Franciszek survived his time at Auschwitz and spent the rest of his life publicly speaking about Fr. Kolbe’s heroism.