Wiktoria Ulma

Wiktoria Ulma, née Niemczak, was born on 10 December 1912 in the village of Markowa in Galicia, then a crown land of Austria-Hungary and today in southeastern Poland. She grew up in a devout Catholic peasant household and received a modest rural education. Contemporary accounts describe her as pious, hardworking, and skilled in household management, gardening, and the care of children. On 7 July 1935 she married Józef Ulma, a local farmer, self-taught photographer, and village librarian several years her senior. The couple settled on a small farm in Markowa, where they combined agricultural labor with parish and community life and were known among neighbors for hospitality and practical charity.

In the years that followed they had six children: Stanisława (born 1936), Barbara (1937), Władysław (1938), Franciszek (1940), Antoni (1941), and Maria (1942). Wiktoria was the center of the domestic and religious formation of the household, teaching prayers and catechism while managing the farmstead. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Markowa fell under the occupation regime of the General Government. Nazi decrees imposed the death penalty on Poles who sheltered Jews. Despite that threat, from late 1942 the Ulmas hid eight Jewish people in their attic and on the farm—members of families from Markowa and nearby Łańcut, commonly identified in the historical record as belonging to the Szall and Goldman (Didner/Grünfeld) circles. The hidden Jews remained with the family for more than a year and took part in farm work, an arrangement that required constant concealment in a village watched by German gendarmes and local collaborators.

In the early hours of 24 March 1944 a detachment of German gendarmes from Łańcut, commanded by Lieutenant Eilert Dieken and acting on a denunciation, surrounded the Ulma farm. They first shot the eight Jews, then executed Józef and Wiktoria—who, according to later village testimony, went into labor during the massacre—and finally killed the six children so that no witnesses would survive. Wiktoria was pregnant; the unborn seventh child died with her. The bodies were left in a ditch beside the house. Villagers later buried them; after the area was liberated they were exhumed and reinterred in the parish cemetery of Markowa, where the family grave remains.

Yad Vashem recognized Józef and Wiktoria Ulma as Righteous Among the Nations in 1995. A museum in Markowa dedicated to Poles who rescued Jews was subsequently named after the family. Their cause of beatification proceeded as a group of martyrs killed in odium fidei. On 10 September 2023 they were beatified in a ceremony held in Markowa by authority of Pope Francis, represented by Cardinal Marcello Semeraro. The decree included the unnamed unborn child, an exceptional recognition in the history of Catholic beatifications. The liturgical memorial of the Blessed Ulma Family is kept on 7 July, the anniversary of Józef and Wiktoria’s wedding. They are venerated as a witness of Christian marriage, parental duty, and sacrificial aid to the persecuted.