Tomorrow Wednesday at 8.30 p.m., the opening of the exhibition The Ulma family. Death by humanity in the Magistral Cathedral of Saints Justo and Pastor in Alcalá de Henares.
The exhibition, under the patronage of the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, has been prepared by the Institute of National Remembrance in Rzeszów and the Committee of the President of the Republic of Poland for the celebrations accompanying the beatification of the Ulma Family, and has been brought to Spain thanks to the collaboration of the Polish National Foundation, Father Sławomir Wiktorowicz, president of the Polonia Domus Nostra Association, and the Instituto Polaco de Cultura.
In 1944 the entire Ulma family, along with the Jewish people they had hidden in their house in Markowa (Poland), were shot by the German Nazis. The Ulmas had sheltered two Jewish families: the Szalls and the Goldmans. In 1944, when the German Nazis got wind of this, they entered the family home and murdered Józef Ulma, his wife Wiktoria, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy, their six children and the eight Jews who were hiding there.
On 10 September next, as Andrzej Duda, President of the Republic of Poland, points out in the letter accompanying the exhibition, the beatification ceremony of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma together with their seven children, including for the first time in history an unborn child, will take place in the village of Markowa.
Józef Ulma’s great passion was photography. He took hundreds of pictures illustrating the everyday life of his family and the inhabitants of Markowa. Some of them can be seen in this exhibition.
In 1995, Józef and Wiktoria Ulma were posthumously recognised as “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Institute. Today, their story, like that of many other Poles who helped Jews during World War II, can be better known thanks to the Ulma Family Museum in Markowa.
Since 2018, 24 March (the anniversary of the murder of the Ulma family) has been Poland’s National Day of Remembrance of Poles who saved Jews under German occupation.
