The Vatican has beatified a Polish family of nine – a married couple and their small children – who were executed by the Nazis during the second world war for sheltering Jews.
During a ceremonious mass in the village of Markowa, in south-east Poland, the papal envoy Cardinal Marcello Semeraro read out the Latin formula of the beatification of the Ulma family signed last month by Pope Francis.
Semeraro said the Ulmas “paid the highest price of martyrdom”.
A contemporary painting representing Jozef and a pregnant Wiktoria Ulma with their children was revealed near the altar. A procession brought relics taken from their grave to the altar. It is the first time that an entire family has been beatified.
At the Vatican, speaking to the public from a window in St Peter’s Square, Francis said the Ulmas “represented a ray of light in the darkness” of the war and should be a model for everyone in “doing good and in the service of those in need”.
Those gathered in Markowa watched the pope’s address on giant screens placed by the altar.
Last year, Francis pronounced the strictly Catholic Ulma family, including the child that Wiktoria Ulma was pregnant with, martyrs for the faith. The Ulmas were killed at home by German Nazi troops and by Nazi-controlled local police in the small hours of 24 March 1944, together with the eight Jews they were hiding at their home, after they were apparently betrayed.
Jozef Ulma, 44, was a farmer, Catholic activist and amateur photographer who documented family and village life. He lived with Wiktoria, 31, and their daughters Stanislawa, seven, Barbara, six, Maria, 18 months, and sons Wladyslaw, five, Franciszek, three, and Antoni, two.
Killed with them were 70-year-old Saul Goldman and his sons Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Mojzesz, along with Golda Grunfeld and her sister Lea Didner with her young daughter Reszla, according to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, IPN, which has meticulously documented the Ulmas’ story.
Giving the orders was Lt Eilert Dieken, the head of the regional Nazi military police. After the war he served in the police in Germany. Only one of his subordinates, Josef Kokott, was convicted in Poland over the killings, dying in prison in 1980.
The suspected betrayer was Wlodzimierz Les, a member of the Nazi-controlled local police. Poland’s wartime resistance sentenced him to death and executed him in September 1944, according to IPN.
The Catholic church had faced a dilemma in beatifying Wiktoria’s unborn child and declaring it a martyr because, among other things, it had not been baptised, which is a requirement for beatification.
The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints issued a clarification saying the child was actually born during the horror of the killings and received “baptism by blood” of its martyred mother.
After beatification, a miracle attributed to the Ulmas’ intercession would be necessary for their eventual canonisation, as the church’s sainthood process is called.
Israel’s Yad Vashem Institute in 1995 recognised the Ulmas as “righteous among nations” who gave their lives trying to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, along with the ruling party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and the prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, as well as Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, attended the celebration in Markowa.
The current Polish government has been accused of celebrating cases of Poles who helped Jews while ignoring more numerous instances of collaboration. Promoting an airbrushed, heroic version of Polish history has been one of the main pillars of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which faces closely fought elections next month.
Historian Jan Grabowski, who has been sued in Poland for his research into the Holocaust in the country, dismissed the beatification as cynical politics.
“Should the Ulma be commemorated? Yes, of course. Should they be commemorated now? Absolutely not. In the present context of militant nationalism, the ultimate sacrifice of the Ulma family is cynically used by people of bad will to distort the history of the Holocaust,” he wrote in a Facebook status last month.
Ron Reisnback, the son of a Jewish survivor from Markowa, turned down an invitation to attend Sunday’s ceremony. In a letter to the Polish authorities declining the invitation he said it was painful to see “such an unbalanced narrative of the realities of Polish-Jewish relations during world war two.”
Associated Press contributed to this article
