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VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Saturday declared as martyrs a Polish couple who had been executed by German police throughout World War II for hiding Jews of their farmhouse.
A farmer and beekeeper, Jozef Ulma, and spouse Wiktoria within the Polish city of Markowa hid a number of members of the Jewish group, who had been being hunted down in the course of the German occupation of Poland. An informant apparently betrayed them, and the Jews had been killed by police in March 1944. The couple had been then shot to dying together with their six younger youngsters, the oldest of whom was 8 years previous.
Recognition of martyrdom would allow the couple to be beatified, the final formal step earlier than potential sainthood. After beatification, a miracle attributed to their intercession could be mandatory for eventual canonization, because the Catholic church’s sainthood course of known as.
According to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, the couple had witnessed the execution of Jews who had been seized from their properties in the course of the summer time of 1942.
While the search was on for different Jews, a Jewish household of six sought shelter with the Ulmas, who took them in, together with two sisters from one other Jewish household, hiding them within the garret of their farmhouse. German police found the Jews on the farm and fatally shot them, earlier than they murdered the farmer, his spouse, who was seven months pregnant, and kids.
According to the Vatican, Pope Francis discovered in regards to the Ulma household when he visited Poland throughout a 2016 pilgrimage. At a public viewers in 2018, Francis hailed the household as “an example of faithfulness to God and His commandments, of love for neighbor and of respect for human dignity.”
Poland was the primary nation invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II. Members of Poland’s resistance and government-in-exile warned the world in regards to the Nazis’ mass killing of Jews, and hundreds of Poles risked their lives to assist Jews — although different Poles murdered or victimized their Jewish compatriots.
Nearly all of Poland’s roughly 3 million Jews had been killed by the Germans and their collaborators in the course of the Holocaust, and the Nazis constructed their main dying camps in occupied Poland.
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