Family killed by Nazis to be beatified in Catholic first

A Polish couple and their seven children, killed by Nazis during World War II for hiding Jews, will be beatified Sunday, the first time an entire family is given one of Catholicism's highest honours.

The ceremony in the family's hometown of Markowa in south-east Poland will be attended by over 30,000 people, including 80 bishops, 1,000 priests, the country's chief rabbi and an Israeli delegation.

It was there, 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.