The Catholic Church beatified this Sunday in Poland a Polish family murdered by the Nazi German occupiers for helping Jews during World War II, a milestone in ecclesial history as it is the first time that an entire family has been beatified. On March 24, 1944, the Ulma couple, Jozef, 44, and Wiktoria, 31, seven months pregnant, and their six children aged between 7 years and 18 months, were shot dead by German police. and Polish collaborationist police. They housed eight Jews on their farm in Markowa, a village in the southeast of the country, who were also murdered.
Some 30,000 people, including a thousand priests, participated this Sunday in the open-air beatification ceremony in Markowa, which was also attended by the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, and a delegation From Israel.
The Ulma family was betrayed by a Polish police officer. In the early morning of the crimes, the children Stanislawa, Barbara, Wladyslav, Franciszek, Antoni and Maria were the last to be murdered. The first to be shot were the eight Jews who had been living hidden in the attic of the farm for a year and a half: the septuagenarian Saul Goldman with his sons Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Moses, along with Golda Grünfeld and her sister Lea Didner with the her little daughter, Reszla, 5 years old, according to the Institute of National Memory (IPN), which has meticulously documented the history of the massacre.
After the investigation necessary for the investigation of the cause for beatification, Pope Francis declared the entire family a martyr, which allows beatification without the requirement of a miracle. For the next stage, an eventual canonization, that is, becoming a saint, martyrdom is not a sufficient reason, so a miracle should be proven through his intercession. As a rule, beatification ceremonies are celebrated in the country and diocese where the new blessed were born or lived, while canonization ceremonies are celebrated in the Vatican.
For the Catholic Church, it has been a delicate dilemma how to approach the case of the baby that Wiktoria was carrying when she died, because he was not baptized, which is a requirement for beatification. Finally, the Vatican dicastery of the Causes of Saints argued on September 5 that the child was born during the horror of the murders and received the “baptism of blood” from her martyred mother. Thus, according to the Catholic Church, the beatified family is made up of the father, the mother and seven children.
Jozef was fond of photography, and often photographed his family on the farm; That is why there are photos of the children barefoot in the countryside, of mother Wiktoria hanging out the laundry or helping them do their schoolwork, or moments of food preparation. They are moving scenes because of what happened to them afterwards.
In 1995, the Israeli Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem recognized the Ulma as Righteous Among the Nations, for having saved Jews during the Holocaust. Since 2018, Poland has dedicated March 24 – the date of the crime – to remember the Poles who helped save Jews during the Nazi occupation.
The Ulma were not the only Catholic neighbors in Markowa who had Jews in hiding. After the massacre, some of them killed their defenseless guests and abandoned their bodies in the fields (there are 24 Jews murdered after that date), while others stood firm and continued protecting those they hid in their homes (21 Jews survived in their homes). area).
In 2016, a museum dedicated to the Ulma family and other Poles in the area who rescued Jews was created in Markowa. However, Yad Vashem warns, “this museum presents an extreme distortion of history” by reflecting only the heroic efforts of some and omitting unpleasant facts such as the denunciations and murders of Jews committed by other Poles.
Eilert Dieken, the German officer who gave the order to murder the Ulma family and the Jews they were hiding, was never tried or punished for the crimes. After the war, he emerged unscathed from a denazification process and worked as a police officer in his hometown of Esens, in what was then West Germany (FRG), where he died in 1960. When they tried to prosecute him, he had already died. .
Law and Justice (PiS), the ultra-conservative party that governs Poland, emphasizes family values ??and also the heroism of Poles during the war, so the beatification of the Ulma family – a decision of the Holy See – fits into its current and intense campaign for the elections on October 15. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s party, led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski. The party aspires to achieve a third term.
