Righteous Among The Nations

"Why did Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma become martyrs for solidarity with the Jews? After their deaths, the Ulma family's Bible was discovered. The Good Samaritan passage was underlined in red ink. Jesus told that parable in response to the question: 'Who is my neighbour?' That question was put in response to Jesus teaching that the two great commandments were love of God and love of neighbour." 

"Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma applied that lesson in the most harrowing and heroic circumstances. They taught their children that their Catholic faith demanded their resistance, and invited them to sacrificial solidarity."

"That lesson was soon learned beyond their family home. Their story was known, preserved and treasured by their fellow villagers."

"In 1994, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance centre, declared Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma to be 'righteous among the nations', the recognition granted to those who saved Jews during the Shoah."

"Since 2018, the anniversary of the murder of the Ulma and Goldman families has been declared in Poland as a 'National Day of Remembrance of Poles Who Saved Jews under German Occupation'."

Father Raymond J. de Souza, Academic, Priest, Journalist

This undated photo shows Polish farmer Jozef Ulma with his wife Wiktoria. The Ulmas were killed with their seven children by the Nazis in 1944 for having sheltered Jews during World War II. (Mateusz Szpytma, Deputy head of Poland's IPN history institute via AP)

 

A lifetime ago, almost 80 years past, on a farm in southeast Poland in a matter of stark, horrendous minutes pf savagery, 17 people were murdered in Nazi-occupied Markowa, Poland. All these years later, the Polish family central to the story of honouring and caring for others at risk of death, a ceremony took place of deep emotional and historical significance with the beatification of an entire family, signifying the penultimate step prior to canonization in the Catholic Church.

The war began in 1939 and by 1942 the Nazi regime prepared its Final Solution to the 'Jewish problem', the plan to organize the systemic murder of Jews in Europe, enlisting the aid of other ethnic groups that were occupied by Nazi forces, to volunteer for positions with SS divisions tasked to obliterate Jewish lives. There was no shortage of volunteers eager to join the killing battalions, but at the same time there were those among whom Jews had lived for countless generations who felt empathy for their neighbours.

This undated photo shows Polish farmer Jozef Ulma with his pregnant wife Wiktoria and their six children. (Mateusz Szpytma, Deputy head of Poland’s IPN history institute via AP)

 

The Ulma family was among the latter group, who strove to help their Jewish neighbours escape the fate in store for those for whom a genocide had been planned, even at risk of losing their own lives. To give any kind of assistance to Jews was to risk immediate death, well known in the greater population, but set aside as inconsequential by Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, a farm family by no means well off, but prepared to absorb into their humble farmhouse eight Jews from two families, to give them shelter.

The Jewish neighbours of the Ulma family were accustomed to their children being playmates. Like any other rural community, neighbours knew one another. And Jozef and Witkoria also knew that Jews in their village were being rounded up and taken away. They decided to act, and in December of 1942 they took into their household an extended Jewish family. Saul Goldman and his four adult sons, Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Moses, became a temporary part of the Ulma household.

But it didn't end there, the Ulmas soon welcomed two sisters, Golda Gruenfell and Lea Didnet, daughters of a relative of Saul Goldman's, along with Lea Didner's daughter, Reszia. The little household became crowded indeed. And the Ulma family with their own six children accepted that they would endure living in such crowded conditions in a house with two bedrooms and an attic. They viewed it as their neighbourly responsibility to house and feed not only their own family but eight others.

To complicate matters, Wiktoria was pregnant with her seventh child. They lived together, miraculously, for a year. Until the presence of Jews living in a Polish home was revealed to police by someone who felt it their duty to be an informer, knowing what the outcome would be. On March 24, 1944, the Nazis arrived to the humble farmhouse, lining up the Goldmans and the Ulmas. First the eight Jews were shot and killed in the presence of the Ulmas.

 

Soldiers stand guard at the flower-covered grave of the Ulma family, a couple with six small children, who were killed by the Germans in 1944 for sheltering eight Jews, who were also killed with the family, during remembrance ceremonies at the cemetery in Markowa, Poland, March 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

 

The soldiers then turned to Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, shooting and killing them in front of their screaming, horrified children. The children were soon silenced as Stanislawa, eight,  Barbara, seven, Wladyslaw, six, Franciszek, four, Antoni, three, and Maria, two followed their parents into death's dominion. And there was a seventh child -- for in the trauma that resulted before their deaths, Wiktoria had gone into labour.

Her seventh child was a little boy, discovered dead alongside his parents and six siblings. When all had been murdered, the Nazis set the house on fire, and celebrated a job well done. Later, on their departure, the neighbouring villagers arrived to exhume the bodies and bury them. 

At the beatification ceremony, the program included the chief rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, attending in honour of the "Good Samaritans of Markowa". Prayers were to be offered at the cemetery where the Goldman family is buried.

Clergy at the beatification ceremony of the Ulma family, who were murdered by Nazis for sheltering Jews in Markowa in south-eastern Poland.   Reuters