Installation of Ulma Family Relic & Bishops Burse Mass

Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children were beatified last September. They were declared martyrs because they were executed by the Nazis for sheltering Jews during World War II.

The pope has called them “witnesses of hope even amid the most horrid examples of human evil.”

Józef was a farmer and beekeeper who occasionally wrote articles for the local newspaper. Wiktoria was a homemaker who participated in amateur theater productions. The family attended Mass at their village’s St. Dorothy Church, and the couple was active in their parish’s Living Rosary Association.

It was during this time the Ulmas decided to act on their faith and help the persecuted Jews.

In 1942, the Ulmas took in a total of eight Jews from two families: Saul Goldman and his sons, Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Moses. There also were two sisters Golda Gruenfell and Layka Didner, who were distant relatives of Saul Goodman, and Layka’s daughter Reszla. All eight were hidden in the attic of the Ulma home for nearly two years. Acting on information from a Markowa village policeman, Nazis stormed the Ulma family home in the early morning hours of March 24, 1944. All eight Jews were executed first, shot in the back of the head.

Then the Nazis shot and killed Wiktoria, who was eight months pregnant with her seventh child, and Józef in front of their six children: Stanislawa, 8; Barbara, 7; Wladyslaw, 6; Franciszek, 4; Antoni, 3; and Maria, 2. When the children began to scream seeing their dead parents, they also were shot and killed.

The Nazis forced several village residents to watch the executions as a warning against future assistance to Jews. The family was immediately buried in front of their home. When Ulma relatives exhumed the bodies almost a year later to bury them properly in the parish cemetery, it was discovered that the unborn child — a boy — had emerged from Wiktoria’s womb, either as she was dying or right after her death.

The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints noted that the Ulmas’ seventh child had been “born at the moment of the mother’s martyrdom,” receiving the “baptism of blood,” and could therefore be “added to the group of child martyrs.”

The Ulma beatification last September is believed to be the first time an entire family has been beatified as martyrs.