By JAMES MONTI
With recent events in the Middle East and the slaughter of Fr. Jacques Hamel in France last year as well as all the signs of anti-Catholic hostility in our own country, the subject of martyrdom for the faith has been receiving growing attention of late.
A whole new chapter in the Church’s history of venerating those who have paid the ultimate price for their faith may soon be written with the amplification this year of the “Roman phase” of the beautification cause for a Polish family of nine, Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven young children.
We have seen in recent years the advancement to the altars of two married couples, Saints Louis and Zelie Martin and Blesseds Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi, but what makes the Ulma cause unique is the inclusion of the entire family, with the oldest child only seven and the youngest an unborn baby still in his mother’s womb at the moment of martyrdom. This appears to be the very first time that an unborn child has been included in a beatification cause.
With nothing more than an elementary school education and a course of agricultural studies, Jozef Ulma (1900-1944), a native of Markowa, Poland, became a highly skilled professional in farming methods, establishing the first fruit tree nursery in his village and winning awards for his innovations in beekeeping and the cultivation of silkworms.
For all his success as a farmer, Jozef had higher priorities in his life. From the age of 17 he belonged to a Catholic association of the Polish Archdiocese of Przemysl, the Mass Union, whose members committed themselves to prayer and fundraising for the construction and restoration of churches and chapels. He also actively participated in the Catholic Youth Association.
The village of Markowa had an Amateur Theater Company, and in a Nativity play the part of the Blessed Virgin Mary was filled by a native girl named Wiktoria Niemczak (1912-1944). It appears likely that it was while participating in this theater company that Wiktoria first met another of the company’s members, Jozef Ulma, who was then in his thirties, 12 years older than she was. Jozef fell in love with Wiktoria, and the two proved to be a perfect match for each other.
They were married at Markowa’s parish church of St. Dorothy in July of 1935 and quickly started a family, with their first child Stasia born a year later. Over the five years that followed, five more children were born: Basia in 1937, Wladziu in 1938, Franus in 1940, Antos in 1941, and Marysia in 1942.
Apart from his agricultural labors, Josef was able to indulge in his favorite pastime, photography, as a member of the Peasant Youth Union, serving also as the association’s librarian. It is due to Jozef’s love for photography that there are many touching photos of his young family. In a scene looking like it was culled from the life of a modern Catholic homeschooling family, we see in one of Jozef’s photos Wiktoria bending low over an open schoolbook on a desk as she instructs two of her children.
Undoubtedly the most haunting photograph of all is that of the entire family, including Jozef, with Wiktoria clearly pregnant, close to full term with her seventh and last child, and holding in her arms little Marysia, as three of the other children are enjoying snacks, one of them, Antos, being spoonfed by the oldest girl, Stasia. The picture had to have been taken shortly before their deaths in 1944.
A relative named Stanislawa Kuzniar, who used to help Wiktoria with her housekeeping chores, recalled seeing Jozef kneeling to say his prayers before retiring for the night. In a family Bible that belonged to the Ulmas, there are three Scripture passages underlined in red, the marks thought to have been made by Jozef.
One was a passage about loving one’s enemies, and the other two were these:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind: and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him” (Luke 10:33-34).
Scarcely could Jozef have conceived when he underlined these words in red that he and Wiktoria would one day underline them in their own blood.
Jozef and Wiktoria had been married for only four years when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. As the Nazis undertook on a massive scale their genocidal crimes against the Jews and the Poles themselves, the occupiers issued a grim threat that anyone caught giving shelter to the Jews would be put to death. As the head of his family, and as a man who was friendly with his Jewish neighbors, Jozef had to face the same question that the Apostles Saints Peter and John had to face when they were confronted with the threats of the Sanhedrin — whether it was right to obey men rather than God (cf. Acts 4:19).
As the markings in the Ulmas’ family Bible show, Jozef and Wiktoria knew there was only one answer to this and acted accordingly.
Into their home the Ulmas welcomed eight Jews from two families — Golda Grunfeld and her sister Layka Didner with her little daughter (the two sisters were from the Goldman family), and a man named Szall with his four grown sons.
With their responsibility for the safety of their own children in the face of the Nazis’ grim threats, this decision of Jozef and Wiktoria to shelter these eight endangered souls could not have been an easy one to make — it would mean that each day they would have to live in constant terror that at any moment a Nazi squad car could suddenly pull up in front of their home to put a bloody end to them all.
But the Ulmas would have also known that without their protection the Goldmans and Szalls would have faced almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis.
From about 1942 until March of 1944, the Ulmas’ efforts to keep their secret guests safe were successful. But somehow word eventually reached the Nazis as to what the Ulmas were doing. Early on the morning of March 24, 1944, a contingent of Nazis together with Polish collaborators from the “Blue Police” arrived at the Ulma farm, accompanied by horse-drawn carts.
The Nazis entered the Ulmas’ home, found the Goldmans and the Szalls and summarily shot them to death.
The Polish cart drivers had remained at a distance while this carnage was carried out, but for what was to follow the Nazis wanted a Polish audience in order to teach the Poles a lesson they would not soon forget.
The cart drivers were made to watch as Jozef and Wiktoria were led out of their home and executed amid the screams of their terrified children. According to one account, Wiktoria was shot first before her husband’s eyes.
After Jozef was gunned down, the assassins discussed what to do with the children. The decision was quickly made to put them all to death as well so as “not to trouble the village with them,” as one of the murderers remarked afterward. One Nazi told the cart drivers, “Look, how Polish swine die — who hide the Jews” (quoted by Mateusz Szpytma, in “Story of Polish Family Slain With Jews They Tried to Save,” April 16, 2011, Zenit.org).
When afterward the bodies of the Ulma family were exhumed, it was discovered that in her dying moments Wiktoria had apparently gone into labor and had begun to bring forth her seventh child.
In the end, the Nazis’ hopes of teaching all the Poles of Markowa a brutal lesson in hatred did not succeed. Twenty Jews were safely sheltered by the villagers and survived the war. In 2003 the Polish Diocese of Przemysl inaugurated a beatification cause for the Ulma family, and with the subsequent completion of this diocesan phase the Roman phase began in 2011.
The Unborn Child
Originally the Ulmas had simply been included as part of a beatification cause for 122 Polish martyr candidates from World War II, but in March of 2017 the Congregation for the Causes of Saints decided to proceed with the Ulma family as a separate cause, a step that serves to accelerate the advancement of their candidacy for beatification.
It is as yet uncertain as to whether the congregation will ratify the decision that had been made at the diocesan level to include the Ulmas’ unborn child as a “martyr,” but if after weighing the theological issues involved a positive decision can be reached in this regard, it would serve as an exceptional new testament to the sacredness of the unborn child.
The ramifications of the hoped-for beatification of the Ulma family, should it ever come to fulfillment, are rather obvious. Although we know little more about the Ulmas’ spiritual life other than that they were faithful, practicing Catholics, the truly heroic circumstances of their deaths as martyrs of charity are more than enough to make them potentially role models and powerful intercessors for Catholic families and the pro-life movement.
At a time when the very definitions of marriage and family life are being profaned as never before, the ennobling example of the Ulma family is needed now more than ever.
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