Maria Ulma

Maria Ulma was born on 16 September 1942 in Markowa, a village in the Łańcut district of southeastern Poland, then under German occupation in the General Government. She was the sixth child of Józef Ulma, a farmer, amateur photographer, beekeeper, and socially engaged Catholic layman, and Wiktoria Ulma, née Niemczak. The Ulmas were a Polish Roman Catholic family of modest means, known locally for piety, literacy, and practical skills such as fruit growing. Maria’s infancy coincided with the most dangerous years of the occupation, when German authorities imposed collective terror and the death penalty on Poles who sheltered Jews.

From about 1942 the Ulma home also concealed eight Jewish fugitives, including members of the Szall family from nearby Łańcut and women and a child from related Goldman and Didner households, hidden in the attic and on the farmstead. Józef belonged to Catholic Action and documented village life with his camera; the family’s decision to hide their neighbours was consistent with their religious and civic convictions, though it placed every member of the household, including the youngest children, in mortal danger. Maria herself, still a baby and then a toddler, had no independent public role. Her life is known only through the history of her parents and siblings and through the circumstances of their shared death.

Before dawn on 24 March 1944, German gendarmes from the post at Łańcut, led by Lieutenant Eilert Dieken and acting on a denunciation, raided the Ulma farm. They shot the Jewish people in hiding and then executed Józef and Wiktoria and their six children in front of the house. Maria was about eighteen months old. Wiktoria was in the late stages of pregnancy; later testimony reported that she went into labour as she was killed, and the Catholic Church has commemorated the unborn child together with the rest of the family as a martyr. The bodies were thrown into a pit near the buildings and in 1945 were transferred to the parish cemetery in Markowa.

After the war the Ulmas became among the best-known Polish rescuers of Jews. Yad Vashem honoured Józef and Wiktoria as Righteous Among the Nations in 1995. A museum dedicated to Poles who saved Jews, named for the Ulma family, opened in Markowa in 2016. The diocesan process for beatification of the whole family, including the children and the unnamed unborn infant, advanced in the early twenty-first century. Pope Francis authorized a decree of martyrdom on 17 December 2022. On 10 September 2023 Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, beatified them at Markowa as papal legate. They are invoked as the Blessed Ulma Family of Markowa, with a liturgical memorial on 7 July, the anniversary of Józef and Wiktoria’s wedding in 1935. Maria Ulma is venerated with her parents and siblings as a child martyr of charity during the Second World War in occupied Poland.