In the spirit of the "Decade of Remembrance", which the partners of the "International Alliance for Peace and Cohesion in Europe" proclaimed on 9 November 2023, a memorial will be erected at Gräfinthal Monastery on Sunday, 17 March, on the initiative of District Administrator Dr Theophil Gallo.
Following the common goal of addressing events of the past with care and consideration for individual fates and perceptions of history, this site will serve as a special memorial in honour of the Ulma family from Markowa.
District Administrator Dr Gallo became aware of the fate of the Ulma family during the first Saarland-Palatinate delegation trip to the partner district of Lancut in 2019. The programme at the time included a visit to the Ulma family museum, opened in honour of the Poles who tried to save or saved Jews from the Holocaust.
"The exhibition about the fate of a small family was deeply moving. The most terrible part of the German-Polish past thus marked the beginning of the partnership with Lancut. It was a vivid reminder of why we have to do all this, why we want to build and maintain friendships with Poland: The goal must be to work together to prevent something similar from happening again."
The Ulma family was shot by German occupying forces on 24 March 1944 because they had hidden eight Jews in their farmhouse for a year and a half to protect them from deportation. On 10 September 2023, the family was beatified in Markowa after Pope Francis recognised the martyrdom of the Polish couple and their seven children in a decree in December 2022. The district administrator had already had the idea of erecting a parallel memorial for the family in the Saarpfalz district. The Gräfinthal Monastery, where a Polish princess was laid to rest, seemed to him to be a suitable location. It was Anna Leszczyńska (1699-1717), the daughter of the Polish king and later Duke of Lorraine, Stanislaus I Leszczyński (1677 - 1766).
"Father Peter from the Benedictine priory was impressed and open to my request, so that we were able to go step by step into the implementation phase. During the Saarland delegation's visit to Markowa in November 2023, Saarland Minister President Anke Rehlinger and I each received an apple tree from the Ulma family's garden to plant in our home country. We will now plant nine apple trees in the Gräfinthal monastery garden, one for each family member, to honour their memory in this way," said the District Administrator.
"The memorial is an important place of solidarity, charity and humility - values that we must not lose sight of when cultivating our friendship with Poland. The memorial in Gräfinthal to a Polish family is an important signal to our Polish friends that we are fully aware of our history and the resulting responsibility for peaceful coexistence in Europe. I would like to thank everyone who helped with the realisation, not least the Benedictine priory led by Father Petrus, our real estate management for the rapid structural preparation of the monastery grounds and the European Commissioner Dr Violetta Frys for her dedicated support of the project."