(ANSA-AFP) - VARSAVIA, 10 SET - A Polish couple and their
seven children, killed by Nazis during World War II for hiding
Jews, were beatified Sunday, the first time an entire family was
given one of Catholicism's highest honours. Papal envoy Cardinal
Marcello Semeraro led the ceremony in the family's hometown of
Markowa in south-east Poland, which was attended by thousands
including the president and prime minister, bishops, priests,
the country's chief rabbi and an Israeli delegation. "May this
Polish family, who represented a ray of light in the darkness of
the Second World War, be for us all a model to imitate in the
impulse of goodness, in the service of those in need," Pope
Francis said on Sunday. It was in Markowa, on March 24, 1944,
that German police acting on a tip-off shot dead Jozef Ulma and
his wife Wiktoria, who was seven months pregnant and partially
gave birth during the execution. Their children, Stanislawa,
Barbara, Wladyslav, Franciszek, Antoni and Maria, aged between
two and eight, were killed too, along with the eight Jews the
family had been hiding in the attic. The eight -- Shaul Goldmann
and his five children, including his daughter Lea Didner and her
five-year-old daughter, and Golda Gruenfeld -- were also shot,
before the family farmhouse was looted and set on fire. The
police fired up into the attic from the floor below, "and the
blood of the victims began to drip from the ceiling... onto a
photograph of two Jewish woman lying on a table below", Vatican
News said. That photograph "has been preserved as a 'relic'", it
said. - Baptism of blood - The massacre followed "a story of
love and friendship", said Italian journalist Manuela Tulli, who
has written a book on the family along with Polish historian and
priest Pawel Rytel-Andrianik. "When the Jews asked for help,
they opened their doors. They lived together for a year and a
half, cooking and eating together", Tulli told AFP. Jozef Ulma
was a keen photographer as well as a farmer, and photographs he
took that survive reveal the family's life through simple,
everyday scenes. "We see the children running barefoot in the
grass, doing their homework, the mother hanging out the
washing," Tulli said. The families were denounced by a Polish
policeman. And after they were executed, 24 Jews in Markowa were
murdered by their Polish neighbours. The Ulma family are the
first ever to be beatified, a key step on a possible path to
sainthood in the Catholic Church. And in a rare move, the Ulmas'
newborn seventh child also earned the title of "blessed". The
child was eligible for beatification through the concept of
"baptism of blood", having been born "at the time of the
mother's martyrdom", according to the Vatican's department for
saints. Usually people need to have performed a miracle to be
eligible for beatification, but martyrs are exempt. Jozef and
Wiktoria Ulma were recognised by Israel in 1995 as members of
the "Righteous among the Nations", an honour for non-Jews who
tried to save Jews from Nazi extermination. The family also has
a museum dedicated to it in Markowa and in 2018 Poland decreed
24 March -- the date of the massacre -- a day of remembrance for
Poles who rescued Jews during the German occupation.
ljm-ide-amj/gw
/ (ANSA-AFP).
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
