2023-09-11 01:10:00
A Polish couple and their seven children, killed by the Nazis during World War II for hiding persecuted Jews, were beatified this Sunday, a milestone as it is the first time that an entire family has received this high recognition from the Catholic Church.
The beatification decided by Pope Francis was celebrated in Markowa, the hometown of the new blessed, to where the Vatican emissary, Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, traveled.
“I hope that this Polish family, which was a ray of light in the darkness of World War II, will be for all a model to imitate of the impetus towards good, at the service of those in need,” Francis said on Sunday.
Thousands of people attended the ceremony, including Poland’s president and prime minister, as well as priests, the country’s chief rabbi and an Israeli delegation.
Tragedy occurred on March 24, 1944 in this town in southeastern Poland, when German police murdered Jozef Ulma and his wife Wiktoria, who was seven months pregnant and gave birth during the massacre.
Their other children, Stanislawa, Barbara, Wladyslav, Franciszek, Antoni and Maria, aged between two and eight, were also executed, along with eight Jewish people the family hid in the attic of the house.
The persecuted Jews were Shaul Goldman and his five children, his five-year-old granddaughter, and Golda Grünfeld.
The Nazis fired into the attic from below, and blood from the victims poured from the ceiling and onto a photograph of two Jewish women on a table.
Currently, this image is “a relic” of martyrdom, according to the Vatican.
The massacre ended with “a story of love and friendship,” explained the Italian journalist Manuella Tulli, who wrote a book about the family together with the Polish historian and priest Pawel Rytel-Andrianik.
“When the Jews asked for help, they opened the doors for them. They lived together for a year and a half, cooking and eating together,” Tulli told AFP.
In addition to being a farmer, Jozef Ulma was fond of photography. Some of his snapshots survived the massacre and reveal family life through everyday scenes.
“We see the children running barefoot on the grass, doing their homework, the mother hanging the clothes,” Tulli said.
The families were denounced by a Polish police officer. After the execution, another 24 Jews in Markowa were murdered by their neighbors.
This is the first time that the Church of Rome beatifies an entire family and in an unusual gesture the Ulma baby, who was not baptized, was included, a condition to receive this distinction.
The child can be beatified through the concept of “baptism of blood” by being born “at the time of the mother’s martyrdom,” according to the Vatican’s canonization department.
The Catholic Church requires that to beatify a believer, he or she must have performed a miracle, but martyrs are exempt.
Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma were recognized in 1995 by Israel as members of the “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor for Gentiles who helped save Jews from Nazi extermination.
In Markowa there is a museum dedicated to the family. And since 2018, Poland decreed March 24, the date of the massacre, as a day of commemoration for the Poles who rescued Jews during the German occupation.
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