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They were called the Forgotten Army but this morning those who died, suffered and served in the Far East during the Second World War will be remembered at a special service to mark VJ Day, 75 years on. The surrender of Japan on August 15 1945 brought not only an end to the conflict but to unspeakable suffering, including the torture and inhumane treatment of many prisoners of war. Yet amid the horror of war are often remarkable stories of courage. Humanity is capable of not just its very worst but also its very best when pushed to the limit, as demonstrated by those in the Far East. Four years to the day before VJ Day, the final stage in another act of courage and indeed noble sacrifice took place in Auschwitz. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest and Franciscan friar who had been arrested by the SS and jailed in Warsaw, then transferred to Auschwitz. In July 1941 a prisoner escaped the concentration camp and 10 others were picked to be executed as punishment for the breakout. One of them begged to be spared, for the sake of his wife and children. Kolbe, as a Catholic priest, had no wife or child and volunteered to take his place. The 10 were starved to death. Kolbe lasted the longest, until an injection finished him off and on August 15, he was cremated in the camp. Forty years later, Kolbe was canonized as a martyr by Pope John Paul II. Traditionally, martyrs are made saints if they have died because of what is called hatred of the faith. John Paul decreed that Kolbe was also a martyr because he was a martyr of charity. He died because he followed the teaching of Jesus: greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. This was in fact a return to a much earlier theology. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas had written that: “Human good can become divine good if it is referred to God; therefore any human good can be a cause of martyrdom”. In other words, dying for the common good, or dying in solidarity with others, should be recognized as a form of martyrdom. In that sense, countless men and women during the Second World War, across Europe, in the desert campaigns and in places like Japan, Singapore and Burma, were sacrificed like martyrs for the common good. When Maximilian Kolbe last saw his fellow friars he said to them: do not forget love. It seems to me that while we rightly remember the suffering of 75 years ago, we should recall the remarkable acts of love too.