On September 10, the Catholic Church will beatify the Polish Ulma family, who died in the Second World War. Jews were saved in the village of Markowa during World War II. The event is unprecedented in that an unborn fetus is raised to the altar, as the youngest member of the Ulma family was born at the moment of his mother's execution.
The beatification can contribute to smoothing over the disagreements and contradictions that still exist in Polish-Jewish and Polish-Israeli relations.
On Sunday, September 10, in the village of Markowa in southern Poland, the Catholic Church beatified the entire Ulma family of seven children who once lived there and suffered martyrdom. They were executed by the occupying Nazi Germans on March 24, 1944. They had to die because they hid persecuted Jews in the attic of their house. The oldest child was eight, the youngest was one year old, and the seventh, a few-month-old fetus, was born at the moment of her mother's execution.
The process of beatification was initiated by the Vatican in 2003, and Pope Francis approved the decree on the martyrdom of the family last December.
The celebratory Mass will be presented by Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for Canonization Affairs, on behalf of Pope Francis, with the participation of almost a thousand Polish and foreign priests (including many Polish missionaries) and more than 80 bishops. In addition, 1,500 choir members and musicians, as well as around 600 invited guests, will take part in the ceremony. All of Poland prepares for the celebration, exhibitions, concerts, contests and scientific conferences are held. Pope Francis will be transferred from Rome after the liturgy, where the Angel of the Lord gives his blessing to the participants of the event in Markow.
An unprecedented event
The parents, Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, were farmers, farming a few hectares in their village in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship. Their execution became a symbol of the martyrdom of the Poles who helped the persecuted Jews, today the Museum of Poles Saving the Jews operates in this small settlement.
It is the first time in the history of the Catholic Church that an entire family, including a fetus still alive in its mother's womb, is raised to the altar.
So far, there have only been examples of the canonization of the parents of a saint, such as St. Thérèse of Lisieux. The strongest argument in favor of the martyrdom of children was the Gospel story of the "little saints": they were killed by the Jewish king Herod the Great in Bethlehem and its surroundings, when he found out that the wise men of the east had set him up and did not tell him the location of the baby Jesus, whom he feared for his power. Jewish children under the age of two at that time did not consciously commit to martyrdom either, yet the church honors them as saints.
Another moving element of the story is that Jews and Christians, united by a common monotheism, suffered martyrdom together in Markowa: Józef and Wiktoria Ulma hid eight members of three Jewish families and their old acquaintances, presumably from the end of 1942. But the most poignant is the death of the fetus still living in its mother's womb. He has no name and we don't know his gender.
His beatification is a very strong sign in a world that regularly takes the lives of unborn fetuses
- said Father Witold Burda, the postulator of the beatification, speaking to the Polish weekly Do Rzeczy.
Scavenger hunt until the last Jew
The German occupiers in the Polish General Government presumably decided to exterminate all Jews as early as 1941. For this purpose, the "Reinhard operation" was launched in March 1942, which reached Markowa in the first days of August of the same year. Jews were told to report to the German authorities. The intention of the occupiers was that they would be dragged to labor camps or extermination camps. Most of the Jews living in the village did not comply with the order, more than fifty of them fled to the surrounding forests or other places that were difficult to access. The Germans launched a manhunt for them, during which they found almost half of those hiding. Twenty-nine Jews were welcomed into their homes by the local Poles, ten other families besides the Ulmás. After the exposure and execution of the Ulma family, none of the families put the Jews who found refuge with them on the street.
Thanks to this, twenty-one Jews survived the German occupation in Markowa.
The Jews hiding in the Ulmás' house were probably given up by a member of the Polish "blue police" serving the Germans, who had probably helped them before. The reason for the report may have been that the Jews allegedly demanded back their confiscated property from him. The person was later sentenced to death by the Polish Home Army fighting against the Germans and executed.
On March 24, 1944, a German gendarmerie squad led by Lieutenant Eilert Dieken appeared in the courtyard of the Ulmás' house, and on whose orders they first shot the Jews, then Józef and Wiktoria Ulmá, and then the children. Dieken was also a policeman before the war. After the end of the war, he was kept in "quarantine" for a few months, they investigated whether he had committed a war crime, but nothing was found. He was taken back to the police in East Germany, where he served until his death in the 1960s. The war years must have been included in his employment.
Neighborly love
What motivated the Ulma couple to risk their lives to hide persecuted Jews? Basically, their deep religiosity, the practice of neighborly love. In their New Testament scriptures, Jesus' parable about the Good Samaritan was underlined, which served as a yardstick for them. It can be seen in the local museum, opened at the given parable. Next to it, Józef or Wiktoria wrote in pencil: "tak" (yes, that's right).
The centuries-long Polish-Jewish coexistence was not without conflicts.
During the German occupation, there were Poles who abandoned their Jewish compatriots. There are testimonies, books, and movies about it. But there were many who saved the persecuted. At the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, Poles are the most numerous among the Righteous of the World. In 1995, Józef and Wiktoria Ulma received this honorary title post mortem, and their life stories can be read on the website of Jad Vasem. It is written about them that they became a symbol of "Polish martyrdom" in the context of the Holocaust.
The Poles also suffered from the almost six-year Nazi German occupation, although they were not taken to the gas chambers. Estimates place the number of Polish and Polish Jewish victims at around three million each. It is understandable that the Poles consider it a serious insult when abroad, sometimes even today, they speak of "Polish death camps", even though these camps were set up by the occupiers. In 2018, the Polish parliament amended the law on the National Institute of Remembrance (IPN), which investigates the crimes of Nazism and Communism: according to this, anyone who holds the Polish people or state responsible for the crimes committed by the Third Reich can be punished with up to three years in prison.
Could the Poles have been expected to participate in the rescue of Jews in greater numbers?
From 1941, the Hitlerites introduced the death penalty for hiding persecuted Jews only in the Soviet territories they occupied, as well as in Yugoslavia and Poland. But it was enforced so brutally only in Poland, where it was carried out on all family members, relatives and even strangers related to the family. The Germans, seeing that they could not break the Poles even in this way, tightened the retribution even further, punishing those who knew about the hiding of Jews but did not report it to them with the death penalty.
The martyrdom of the deeply religious family was hushed up during the decades of communism, and their memory was revived only after the regime change.
In 2004, a memorial was erected to them, and one of the surviving Jews from Markova, Izaak Seagal, also appeared at the inauguration. With his encouragement, thousands of young Israelis visited the village in the following years. Later, the Museum of Poles Saving the Jews was opened.
There were no objections from the Jewish side to the beatification and the celebration, which will hopefully contribute to smoothing over the disagreements and antagonisms that still exist in Polish-Jewish and Polish-Israeli relations.
Featured image: The grave of the Ulma family. Photo: AFP/NurPhoto/Artur Widak
