Bright embers from the ashes of the Holocaust

National Post, 09 September 2023

The Catholic Church will beatify an entire family who lost their lives trying to save their Jewish neighbours

Nearly 80 years ago on a farm in southeast Poland, 17 people were killed in a matter of minutes. On Sunday, in their hometown of Markowa, the Ulma family will be beatified, the last step before canonization in the Catholic Church.

Seventeen deaths out of the tens of millions who died in the “bloodlands” — historian Timothy Snyder’s apt name for the killing fields between Hitler and Stalin — is next to nothing. But it is not nothing for Jews and Christians who believe that every person is made in the image of God.

Sunday will be the first time that an entire family has been beatified together. Their story is horrifying and inspiring at the same time.

In 1942, the Nazi regime began to implement its “final solution” for European Jewry. Jews in Nazi-occupied territories began to be rounded up and deported to the camps. Markowa, like most cities and towns in Poland at the time, had a Jewish community; indeed, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, some three million.

Jozef and Witkoria Ulma had Jewish neighbours and their children played together. Throughout 1942, they saw most of their town’s Jewish community taken away.

In December 1942, they took decisive action. They welcomed into their home an extended Jewish family: Saul Goldman and his four adult sons, Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Moses. Two sisters joined the five men, Gołda Gruenfell and Lea (Layka) Didner, who were daughters of a relative of Saul Goldman’s. Lea Didner also had her daughter, Reszla, with her.

Hiding Jews put the family in lethal danger. Those caught would be executed, usually on the spot. The Ulmas were not wealthy. Simple farmers, they took eight Jews into their small home, with only two bedrooms and an attic. Just housing and feeding them was no small task, independent of the peril of the Shoah.

Jozef and Wiktoria also had six children of their own. In 1943, they were expecting their seventh. They chose to make their humble home a refuge for those threatened by death on an industrial scale. For more than a year, they lived knowing that every morning could be their last.

The Nazis came on March 24, 1944. They lined up the Goldmans and the Ulmas. In front of the Ulmas, the eight were summarily shot and killed. The soldiers then turned their fury on Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, then seven months pregnant. They were shot and killed in front of their terrified and screaming children. The screams were soon silenced, as the Nazis murdered the little ones: Stanisława, 8, Barbara, 7, Władysław, 6, Franciszek, 4, Antoni, 3, and Maria, 2.

The house was then set on fire. The Nazis hastily buried the bodies. The grisly work done, they celebrated with vodka and merriment.

The neighbouring villagers came later to exhume the bodies and grant them a proper burial. They discovered that in the trauma of murder, Wiktoria Ulma had gone into labour. Her seventh child, a son, was found in the grave, dead alongside his parents and six siblings.

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