Józef and Wiktoria Ulma were a Polish Catholic couple murdered by the Nazis in 1944 for sheltering Jews. They were beatified in 2023 along with their six children and their unborn seventh child—the first time an entire family was beatified together. Aleteia explores what connected their witness to that of St. John Paul II, who grew up in the same Nazi-occupied Poland a generation earlier. Both responded to totalitarian evil not with despair but with concrete acts of faith.
What happened
The Ulmas lived in the village of Markowa in southeastern Poland during World War II. Józef was a farmer and amateur photographer; Wiktoria was pregnant with their seventh child when German police discovered the family was hiding eight Jews in their home. On March 24, 1944, the entire household was executed: the eight Jewish refugees, then Józef, Wiktoria, and their six children aged one to eight. Wiktoria was in her ninth month of pregnancy.
Karol Wojtyła, the future John Paul II, was twenty-four when the Ulmas were killed. He had spent the war years in Kraków under the same Nazi occupation, working in a quarry and chemical factory while secretly studying for the priesthood in an underground seminary. Both he and the Ulmas witnessed the Nazi attempt to erase Poland’s Catholic and Jewish communities. Both chose resistance rooted in Catholic moral clarity.
The Ulma family was beatified by Pope Francis on September 10, 2023, in a Mass at Markowa attended by more than thirty thousand pilgrims. Their beatification recognized them as martyrs of charity—killed in hatred of the Christian faith that compelled them to risk their lives for others.
Why this matters
The parallel Aleteia draws is not biographical but moral. John Paul II’s papacy was shaped by his experience of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. He taught that the family is the fundamental unit of society, that life is sacred from conception to natural death, and that Christians must defend human dignity even at personal cost. The Ulmas lived those principles before Wojtyła articulated them as Pope.
Their beatification also counters a persistent historical distortion: that Poles were broadly complicit in the Holocaust. The Ulmas are among more than seven thousand Poles recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Poland was the only occupied country where hiding Jews was punishable by automatic execution of the rescuer and their entire family. The Ulmas knew the risk and accepted it.
For Catholic readers
The Ulma family’s memorial site and museum are in Markowa, Poland. Their story is a powerful catechesis on the domestic church: a family that prayed the Rosary together, raised their children in the faith, and chose martyrdom over betraying their Jewish neighbors. If you are looking for a model of family holiness in the face of modern pressures, the Ulmas offer one.
Their feast day is March 24, the anniversary of their martyrdom. Pray for their intercession for families under persecution and for the courage to shelter the vulnerable in your own community.
Sources: 1. Aleteia — original report
