After the invasion, the Polish government refused to sign the act of capitulation to the Germans, which resulted in extremely brutal repressions, including mass executions of the civilian population. Throughout World War II, Poland remained an active member of the Allied Forces and was Europe’s only government that refused any form of collaboration with the Germans.

The German invaders instituted a reign of terror in Poland and instituted policies that were designed to deprive the Poles of their national identity. The German administrative measures served two major goals: to complete the Germanisation process and benefit the Third Reich. Hans Frank, the Governor General of German-occupied part of Poland, said: I received a command to ruthlessly pillage the invaded Eastern territories; my goal is to ruin them economically, socially, culturally and politically.

The German plan was to eradicate Polish identity in any shape or form by pillaging and destroying the cultural heritage and putting a stop to the political and social life of the Polish nation. Any form of resistance against the German authorities would end in bloodshed. The presence of the German administration was felt almost everywhere. Street and city names were changed to German, and the largest squares were renamed to celebrate Adolf Hitler. The Gothic font, which was the Nazis’ favourite, was used to emphasise their rule.

The action that targeted the Polish elite was one of the main measures to force Germanisation in the territories incorporated into the Third Reich. The Intelligenzaktion was designed to exterminate the opinion-formers in Polish society. About 100,000 citizens, who were particularly vital to Poland’s infrastructure (including teachers, scientists, clergy, doctors, lawyers and former soldiers) were murdered in mass executions, or deported to German concentration camps, where only a few managed to survive. Children were exposed to the Germanisation process. It is estimated that throughout World War II, about150,000 young Polish citizens were displaced from Poland to Germany.

Each and every Pole feared for his or her life and the lives of their nearest and dearest. Poland’s German invaders thought nothing of the international humanitarian law. They administered the most severe repressions for the slightest offence often for no reason other than to induce fear in people and force them into total submission.

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The underground judicial system passed hundreds of death sentences on German officials and their collaborators. Justice was served, even on Franz Kutschera, the SS and Police Leader in the Warsaw District of the General Government. The German criminal was sentenced to death by the Polish judicial system for launching a reign of terror against the civilian population that included mass executions and numerous round-ups in the streets of Warsaw. The sentence was carried out by a Home Army unit.

Draconian punishments were meted out for any form of resistance against the German authorities. Service to the Underground Polish State was punishable by death or deportation to a concentration camp. One of the persons affected was General Stefan Rowecki, pseudonym Grot (“Arrowhead”), the most prominent figure of the Polish Underground State and the Home Army’s founder.  Soon after his capture by the Gestapo in July 1943 he was transferred to Sachsenhausen. He was tortured and repeatedly encouraged to form an alliance between the Home Army and Germany against the Soviet Union, and later, to stop the Warsaw Uprising. The General remained adamant and was eventually executed.

Many civilians arrested for underground activity also died in the German camps. The underground education system provided tuition to over one million Polish people throughout the war. Nine thousand teachers and over 600 academic lecturers paid the ultimate price for their activities. The Roman Catholic Church in Poland also suffered repressions. Father Maksymilian Kolbe was only one of thousands of Polish priests who lost their lives in the German concentration camps.

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The SS officers and guards working in the camp derived particular pleasure from administering inhumane punishments to the prisoners, who were already exhausted from malnutrition and gruelling labour. The punishments included public flogging with a wooden stick, incarceration of several people for up to twenty nights in a cramped room that was just one square metre in size and with very little air. The prisoners had to stand all night, and also continue to work without flagging throughout the day.

A particularly severe punishment was administered at the “post”: a prisoner with their hands tied at the back, would be hung, feet from the ground, from a hook for several hours on end. This form of torture invariably ended in ruptured arm tendons, which meant the prisoner, unable to use their hands to work, was doomed to be sent to the gas chambers.

Extermination by gassing was not the only way the German personnel murdered their prisoners. They were also executed by firing squad, public hanging, or starvation. Around 1.1 million people died in KZ Auschwitz at the hands of the Germans: people of 20 different ethnicities, of different denominations and beliefs, scholars and factory workers, men, women, children, and the elderly.

These barbarous activities were perpetrated not only in KZ Auschwitz, but also in  many other concentration camps throughout German-occupied Poland. In 1940, KZ Gross-Rosen was set up, where 40,000 people were murdered by 1945. In 1941, KZ Lublin was established, which goes by the name of Majdanek. About 80,000 people died in that camp. Other German concentration camps in Poland include KZ Płaszów (about 7,000–8,000 victims), KZ Stutthof (about 63,000 victims) and KZ Warschau (about 20,000 victims). The camps were staffed by the SS.

German extermination camps in Poland constitute a whole different category. They were created with a design to totally annihilate the Jewish population of Europe. Roma people and Soviet POWs were also murdered in the camps. Extermination camps began to operate in 1941 in locations such as Chełmno on the Ner, and in 1942 in Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau and KZ Lublin are in turn considered to be both concentration and death camps.

Masses of people were murdered in extermination camps over a specific period of time. In Chełmno on the Ner, the victims were pushed into the lorries and suffocated with exhaust fumes. These mobile gas chambers were used by the Germans to exterminate from 200,000 to 300,000 Jewish people from Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and the Netherlands as well as Polish people from nursing homes in Łódź and Włocławek or Polish children from the vicinity of Zamość. Most of the 450,000 of Bełżec victims and the 170,000–180,000 of Sobibór victims were Jewish. Treblinka, where ca. 800,000 people died, was also designed to institute the “final solution”. The German administration began the process of liquidating the camps in December 1942. The last camps remained until January 1945. The Germans tried to cover up the traces of their barbarous activity. They destroyed the gas chambers, demolished the barracks, and had the camp areas thoroughly ploughed and planted with grass.

Apart from the death and concentration camps, the German administration also created hundreds of other camps in Poland. Forced labour camps accounted for the largest proportion in the group. Their inmates worked as road builders and farmers. They were also forced to build fortifications. The camps were notorious for their high fatality rate caused by hunger, gruelling labour, terror and terrible living conditions. Forced labour camps for Polish people were in operation until 1945.

Photos by courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum

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They were a happy loving Polish family. He worked hard to provide for them. She took care of the hearth and home and raised the children. With their unique bravery in the face of German brutalities, the Ulma family became the symbol of heroism in times of adversity. They epitomise all those Polish people who saved their Jewish neighbours.

The Ulma family lived in the village of Markowa in south-eastern Poland. Józef, despite having only an education of only four years in primary school and a farming course, was a veritable jack of all trades. He tried his hand at a tannery, at bee-keeping, at silkworm farming, and as a fruit-tree grower. He also earned a living as a documentary photographer and volunteered his services in a library. Wiktoria devoted all her time to raising six small children. They lived a modest but happy life. They took a life-threatening risk to save two Jewish families (eight people in total) in mid-1942. They were perfectly aware that if the Germans found out, they would face a firing squad as was stipulated by the brutal and inhumane law of German-occupied Poland.

It was a cold spring morning on 24 March 1944. The Ulma family home was approached by four horse-drawn carts carrying a squad of eight German soldiers and Blue-Police officers (a Police formation consisting of pre-war Polish police officers, who were conscripted by the German administration). Blue-Police officers stayed outside. The Germans were ruthless. They barged in and murdered three people in their sleep. As soon as they had killed all the Jews, they led Józef and Wiktoria, who was in the last weeks of her pregnancy, to the front of their house, and unscrupulously killed them while their children stood and watched. They had no mercy for the children, either. Eight-year-old Stanisław, six-year-old Barbara, five-year-old Władysław, four-year-old Franciszek, three-year-old Antoni and eighteen-month-old Maria soon joined their parents. Look and see how the Polish pigs die, Joseph Kokott was reported to have shouted.

What made the Ulma family risk their own lives to save others? Base motives, such as monetary gain, can easily be excluded, since a lot of savings were found with the murdered Jewish families. In all likelihood, the Ulma family did this from compassion for their neighbours. Józef Ulma was known to have taken a selfless risk to aid another Jewish family. He assisted them in building a dugout in the nearby forest and regularly brought them food supplies. Although the Germans found the shelter and killed four people, they were not able to find their helper.

The Bible discovered in their home seems to suggest what values guided the Ulma family in their lives. Two important passages were marked in their copy. The first to be highlighted was the “Commandment of Love” and the parable of “The Good Samaritan”. The second was on the passage defining Christian duties: “For if you love only those who love you, what reward have you earned?” (Matthew 5:46, Weymouth New Testatment).

In 1995, Józef and Wiktoria Ulma were posthumously awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”. In 2010, they were decorated with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by President Lech Kaczyński. Their beatification procedure is under way in the Vatican. In March 2016, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in the Podkarpacie Region was established.

Photos by courtesy the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jewish People During World War II in Markowa.

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