In Markowa, a town of 4,000 inhabitants in south-east Poland not far from the Ukrainian border, before nearly 1,000 priests, 80 Polish and foreign bishops and cardinals, and a crowd of over 30,000 faithful, the beatification of an entire family occurred on September 19, 2023. Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children were martyred on March 24, 1944 for having hidden three Jewish families under their roof. This beatification is unprecedented in the history of the Catholic Church, as it is the first time an entire family has been raised to the altars and collectively recognized as martyrs.
The Church holds this family as an example of love for one's neighbour, even to the point of giving one's life, and of conjugal and family love. They died as martyrs because their murderers were motivated, not only by a hatred of the Jews, but also by an equally ferocious hatred of Christian charity. Their liturgical feast day is July 7, the date of the wedding of Józef Ulma and Wiktoria Niemczak.
When they married, Józef was 35 and Wiktoria 22. Six children were born: Stanisława (July 18, 1936), Barbara (October 6, 1937), Władysław ( December 5, 1938), Franciszek (April 3, 1940), Antoni (June 6, 1941), and Maria (September 16, 1942). The seventh child tells a beautiful story of what happened on that fateful day in March, 1944.
As early as 1941, the German occupiers of Poland declared that Poles who hid Jews would be liable to the death penalty. Despite this, many Polish families did help and put their own lives at risk. This was the case of Józef and Wiktoria, who in 1942 took in eight members of two Jewish families: Saul Goldman and his sons Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Moses, as well as the Ulmas' neighbours, Gołda Grünfeld and Lea Didner, and their young daughter, Reszla.
A spy revealed their presence to the Germans and on the morning of March 24, 1944, police descended on the Ulma home, forced all the occupants to leave the house and shot the eight Jewish residents in the back of their heads. Józef and Wiktoria were killed on the doorstep of their home in front of their children and in full view of many villagers. The children were then shot. Józef was 44, Wiktoria 31, and their six children were between 1 and 8 years. The house was set on fire and the bodies hastily buried in a pit.
It is here that the mystery of the unnamed seventh child, referred to simply as the "seventh child of the Ulma family" by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, is revealed. One week after their deaths, the bodies of the Ulma family were dug up by villagers in order to give them a proper burial in the cemetery. They saw, next to the body of Wiktoria, who was seven months pregnant at the time of her murder, a newborn baby. This seventh child had been born a few moments after his mother's execution.
A note from the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, dated September 5, 2023, explained that "At the time of the massacre, Mrs. Wiktoria Ulma was in an advanced state of pregnancy with her seventh child. This child was born at the same time as his mother's martyrdom, and therefore received the baptism of blood himself". As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains (n. 1258),
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