Suggest an Edit — Józef Ulma

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Biography

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Józef Ulma was born on 2 March 1900 in the village of Markowa in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then part of Austria-Hungary and today in southeastern Poland. He grew up in a Polish Catholic farming family and received practical agricultural training. As an adult he was known locally as an industrious and inventive farmer who cultivated fruit trees, kept bees, and raised silkworms. He was also a self-taught photographer, and many of his pictures of village life and of his own household survive. Ulma took part in Catholic lay associations, including Catholic Action, and in rural youth and cooperative groups, combining religious practice with efforts to improve village conditions.

In 1935 he married Wiktoria Niemczak, a fellow parishioner from Markowa. They lived on a modest farm and had six children between 1936 and 1942: Stanisława, Barbara, Władysław, Franciszek, Antoni, and Maria. Wiktoria was pregnant with a seventh child in early 1944. The household was regarded as devout. After the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War, when hiding Jews was punishable by death for entire Polish families, the Ulmas took Jewish fugitives into their house. Historical accounts identify eight people whom they sheltered from late 1942, members of the Szall family from nearby Łańcut and of the Goldman, Didner, and Grünfeld families connected with Markowa.

In the early hours of 24 March 1944, German gendarmes, acting on a denunciation, surrounded the Ulma farm. They shot the Jewish people in hiding and then killed Józef and Wiktoria and their six children. Wiktoria, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, died together with the unborn or newly delivered child; the Catholic Church later included that child among the family's martyrs. The victims were first buried near the house and afterward reinterred in the parish cemetery of Markowa.

After the war the Ulmas became among the best-known Polish rescuers of Jews. Yad Vashem recognized Józef and Wiktoria Ulma as Righteous Among the Nations in 1995. A museum dedicated to Poles who saved Jews was later established in Markowa. The Catholic Church opened a cause for beatification of the whole family. Pope Francis recognized their martyrdom, and on 10 September 2023 they were beatified in Markowa as the Ulma Family—Józef, Wiktoria, and their seven children—the first time an entire family, including an unborn child, was raised together to the honors of the altar. Their liturgical memorial is observed on 7 July.

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