Antoni Ulma

Antoni Ulma was a Polish Roman Catholic child of the Latin rite and a martyr of the Second World War. He was born in 1941 in the village of Markowa in the Subcarpathian countryside of Poland, the son of Józef Ulma and Wiktoria Ulma (née Niemczak). His father was a smallholder known locally as a farmer, beekeeper, amateur photographer, and village librarian; his mother kept the household. The family belonged to the parish of Markowa and lived the ordinary religious life of rural Polish Catholics in the last years of the Second Polish Republic and then under German occupation. Antoni grew up among several older siblings in a modest farmhouse. He was still a toddler when the war’s racial persecutions reached their most lethal phase in the region.

Under German occupation, hiding Jews was a capital crime in the General Government. In 1942 Józef and Wiktoria Ulma took into their home eight Jewish people who had been expelled or hunted from nearby towns, including members of the Szall family of Łańcut and persons associated with the Goldman family (among them Golda Grünfeld and Lea Didner and her child). For many months the Ulmas shared food, space, and the risk of discovery with those they sheltered, while continuing to raise their own children. Antoni therefore spent his brief life in a household that was at once a Catholic farm family and a clandestine refuge. The decision of his parents was rooted in Christian teaching on the dignity of every person and in the Gospel command to love one’s neighbour, at a time when such fidelity could mean death.

At dawn on 24 March 1944, German gendarmes from Łańcut, acting on a denunciation, surrounded the Ulma farm. They first shot the eight Jewish people found in hiding. They then executed Józef and Wiktoria; Wiktoria was in an advanced stage of pregnancy, and the unborn child died with her. The police next killed the six Ulma children, among them Antoni, who was about two or three years old. The massacre was staged as a public warning against aiding Jews; neighbours were forced to witness parts of it. The bodies of the family were at first buried in a pit near the house. After the area was freed from German control they were exhumed and reburied in the parish cemetery of Markowa, where they remain.

The diocesan process for the Ulma family was conducted in the Diocese of Przemyśl. They were judged martyrs killed in odium fidei, because their Christian conviction led them to protect the persecuted at the cost of their lives. Pope Francis authorized the decree of martyrdom. On 10 September 2023 the entire family—Józef, Wiktoria, their six born children including Antoni, and the unborn child—was beatified together at Markowa, an unprecedented recognition of a whole family, including an unborn infant, in a single Catholic beatification. Blessed Antoni Ulma is therefore venerated with his parents and siblings as a child martyr of charity. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 7 July.