Righteous Among The Nations

 

"They brought their factories of death to the Polish lands."

"In Poland, even if you gave a glass of water or a slice of bread [to a Jew during the Nazi occupation] that was considered help and was punishable by death."

"The Polish state has a special obligation, a special duty to make sure that remembering the Holocaust is preserved. We need to make sure that this remembrance is passed on to the future generations."

Wojciech Kolarski, Polish culture minister

"The government tries to impose a certain narrative showing Poland as the most pure nation of the world. Many governments do this; it is not a very original idea."

"There's no doubt whatever that the Ulma family were heroes and what they did was absolutely heroic. We should remember them."

"The problem is that using the righteous people for an electoral campaign is very low."

Piotr Wrobel, history professor, University of Toronto, Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish Studies

"Jews were generally accepted in Poland when they weren't necessarily accepted in other places in Europe."

"Most of the Holocaust survivors are people who survived in hiding, either because they went east [fleeing to Russia], or because they were given out by their family members to non-Jewish families [to hide and give Polish names and backgrounds to]."

"What we try to do is we try to expose people to the idea that war is complicated and it brings out the best and the worst in people."

"Did Poland perpetrate the Holocaust? No. Were there Poles who contributed to the suffering of the Jews? Yes."

Sebastian Rudel, deputy director, Jewish Community Centre, Krakow, Poland

People stand at the Ulma grave during the beatification of the family in Markowa on September 10, 2023. Photo by BARTOSZ SIEDLIK/AFP via Getty Images

The Catholic Church in Poland earlier this month beatified Wiktoria and Jozef Ulma, along with their children and their unborn child, in what is potentially the first step on the path to sainthood in the Church for the family. It will represent the first time in Catholic history that an entire family will have been so honoured. Poland holds this family in the highest regard, memorialized in postage stamps and coins. A museum is even dedicated to the family and to hundreds of other Polish families who stepped into the lethal danger zone of aiding Jews during the Holocaust.

 Ulma Family, circa 1943

In the case of the Ulmas, an indigent rural family with a stern moral outlook on life that committed them unequivocally to face danger in exchange for self-respect and empathy for the plight of their neighbours, they undertook to shelter two Jewish families, eight people in total in their modest home close to the village of Markowa in the war years. Jozef was 44, his wife Wiktoria 31, their daughters Stanislawa, 7, Barbara,6, Maria, 18 months, and sons Wladyslaw, 5, Franciszek, 3, and Antoni, 2.

The Jews they sheltered and who were summarily slaughtered by the Nazis in the crowded little farmhouse were 70-year-old Saul Goldman, his sons Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Mojzesz, along with Golda Grunfeld and her sister Lea Didner with her young daughter Reszla, according to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance which documented the Ulmas’ story. The family was previously memorialized as 'righteous among the nations' by Yad Vashem in Israel in 1995.

On March 24, 1944 when German police --  responding to an informer who became aware of the family's involvement in sheltering Jews and then reported them to authorities -- raided the home. Not only were the eight Jews being sheltered by the Ulma family murdered, but the murder spree included Jozef and Wiktoria, pregnant at the time, and their six children. During the violence, Wiktoria went into sudden labour and the Ulma family's youngest was briefly introduced to the world. None survived.

 

 

A nun views a display about the Ulma family outside the presidential palace in Warsaw.  Photo by Ryan Tumilty

 

The family has been recognized as an important symbol of national honour for Poles, fitting right in with the national narrative that Jews and Catholics lived a peaceful co-existence before the German occupation shattered the status quo and produced the Holocaust, drawing Poland into Germany's state-sponsored genocide through its orchestrated mass extermination of Europe's Jews.

Before the advent of the Second World War, an estimated 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, 90 percent of Polish Jews were murdered, along with hundreds of thousands of Poles whom the Nazis also considered to be a sub-human species. It was not only Polish Jews that were annihilated in the many death camps established in Poland by Nazi Germany; Poland became a gathering-point for Jews transported from other parts of Europe.

The six most-infamous extermination camps were established in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka. Although Jews felt more accepted in Poland than in many other countries in Europe, particularly in the east, there was ample persecution and antisemitism along with deadly pogroms carried out against Jews in the country. Violence by Poles, stoutly religious Catholics where the church itself acted in promoting antisemitism, was not uncommon before the war.

There were many Jew-hating Poles who took their hate out in persecution and violence against Polish Jews. The Ulma family was an exception, among even the thousands of Poles who sacrificed their security in favour of trying to help neighbours frantic to escape mass death. Postwar, when Communists ruled Poland, they encouraged the Jews that remained to leave the country, continuing the old tradition of antisemitism. In fact, Jews who survived the Holocaust, returning to their towns and villages were met with threats from former neighbours now living in their homes.

Relations between Jews and the Polish Law and Justice party government in 2018 became strained when the country's Holocaust denial law made it illegal to publicly claim Poland or the Polish nation to have been involved in Nazi atrocities. The changes were withdrawn under outraged protests, including from the government of Israel. What remains is the potential of civil penalties for anyone implying Poles had any element of an active role during the Holocaust. Which, in certain documented instances they did have.

 

Jan Gross, Polish American history professor, has received opprobrium and has been investigated for libel, criticized by the current Polish government in relation to his work identifying a number of pogroms carried out in Poland against Jews by Poles themselves in the early period of the war. As Piotr Wrobel, University of Toronto history professor points out, Poland's view of history and Jews is accurate enough, albeit politicized by the government Law and Justice party.

The estimated 16,000 people comprising the Jewish community in today's Poland is small in a country of close to 38 million, yet the many synagogues that serviced Poland's large pre-war Jewish population have been protected and preserved. Sebastian Rudol, deputy director of Krakow's Jewish  Community Centre, states that the contemporary community views the debate surrounding responsibility as more nuanced in view of various aspects of the past in Polish-Jewish relations.

His centre caters to their small Jewish community. And it has  reached out to respond to the war in neighbouring Ukraine to help the conflict's refugees. Its agenda is also to help people whom ancestry searches identify their families' hidden backgrounds as Jews. When their forbears sought to protect themselves from antipathy to and persecution of Jews, by hiding their Jewish identity and assuming a Christian background in its stead.

Clergy attend the beatification ceremony of the Ulma family, who were murdered by German Nazis for sheltering Jews in Markowa, Poland September 10, 2023. Patryk Ogorzalek/Agencja Wyborcza.pl via REUTERS