Suggest an Edit — Franciszek Ulma

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Biography

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Franciszek Ulma was born on 12 September 1900 in Markowa, a village in the historical region of Galicia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule and today in southeastern Poland. He grew up in a Polish Catholic farming community and received a practical rural education. As an adult he combined ordinary farm labor with uncommon versatility: he kept bees, cultivated fruit trees, experimented with silkworms, and became a competent photographer whose glass-plate images later became important visual records of village life. He attended agricultural courses, belonged to the Catholic Youth Association, and served as librarian of a parish reading room, showing both religious commitment and a desire to raise the cultural level of his neighbors.

On 7 July 1935 he married Wiktoria Niemczak, who was also from Markowa. The couple lived on a small farm at the outskirts of the village and had six children between 1936 and 1942: Stanisława, Barbara, Władysław, Franciszek, Antoni, and Maria. In early 1944 Wiktoria was pregnant with a seventh child. Neighbors remembered the household as hardworking, devout, and hospitable. Franciszek photographed his wife and children, leaving a rare intimate record of a Polish peasant family on the eve of its destruction.

During the German occupation of Poland, Nazi decrees imposed the death penalty on anyone who sheltered Jews. Despite that threat, the Ulmas hid eight Jewish people on their farm, members of the Szall family of Łańcut and of the Goldman family. They lived in concealment in the attic and outbuildings while sharing the family's food and work. In the early morning of 24 March 1944, German gendarmes from nearby Łańcut, acting on a denunciation by a local collaborator, surrounded the property. They first shot the Jewish fugitives, then Franciszek and Wiktoria, and then the six children. Witnesses later reported that Wiktoria went into labor during the killings; the Church has treated the unborn child as a seventh child-martyr. The bodies were left exposed before villagers were allowed to bury them in the parish cemetery.

After the war the Ulmas became among the best-known Polish rescuers of Jews. Yad Vashem recognized Franciszek and Wiktoria as Righteous Among the Nations in 1995. A museum dedicated to Poles who saved Jews, named for the Ulma family, was opened in Markowa. The Catholic diocesan process for beatification presented them as martyrs killed in odium fidei for charity toward the persecuted. Pope Francis approved the beatification, which was celebrated on 10 September 2023 in Markowa by Cardinal Marcello Semeraro as papal legate—the first beatification of an entire family, including an unborn child, in the history of the Church. Their liturgical memorial is observed on 7 July.

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