Maria Skobtsova , known as Mother Maria of Paris, who saved numerous Jews
in Nazi-occupied Paris, was born Elisabeth
Pilenko on 20th December 1891 to a well-to-do Russian family in the Latvian city of Riga. Her parents were
devout Orthodox Christians and in this atmosphere of piety Elisabeth was raised
to love and serve God. All this changed at the age of fourteen when her father
died, which seemed meaningless and unjust to her. She decided that she no
longer believed in God and declared herself an atheist. "If there is no justice, there is no God!" she
said.
During her teenage years, Russia
was in the throes of the approaching end of Tsarist rule, the subsequent
revolution and Communist rise to power. Elisabeth became enamored of this
revolutionary movement and at the age of 18 married a member of the Bolshevik
party. While at the university in St. Petersburg,
she was involved with an avant-garde
literary circle and later published two
volumes of poetry that were highly acclaimed. Though she still regarded herself as an atheist she began to question
her revolutionary sympathies as she saw the violence, poverty and suffering
that the revolution plunged Russia
into. Little by little, her earlier attraction to Christ and His Church came
back to life and grew deeper in her soul. She began to read the Gospels and
lives of the Saints. She applied for entrance to the Theological Seminary at
St. Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St.
Petersburg, an unprecedented request. Up to this date
only male students preparing for the priesthood were admitted to the seminary
and yet, surprisingly, she was admitted to the renowned school.
By 1913 Elisabeth's marriage had
collapsed and ended in divorce while she was expecting their first child,
Gaiana. Returning home to her family's country estate in Russia's south, she joined the
Social Revolutionary party after the February Revolution. She apparently wished to
assassinate Leon Trotsky for closing the SR Party Congress, but friends
persuaded her to instead move back to the Black Sea to work for the SR
there. She was very active as a community organizer in Anapa, and in
1918 was elected mayor of the city when it fell under White Army
control.
She led underground resistance against the Bolsheviks, while
trying to protect the population from the terror of the new regime. She
was arrested and put on trial, but managed to escape capital punishment
due to a skilled defence and help by the judge, D. Skobtsov, whom she
ended up falling in love with and marrying. Before long Elizabeth
was again pregnant and her son, Yuri, was born and later another daughter,
Anastasia. With the Bolsheviks beginning to gain the upper hand in the civil
war, Daniel and Elizabeth decided s too dangerous to remain in Russia and after a long journey found themselves
in Paris, France in 1923.
Tragedy struck the family in 1926
when five year old Anastasia died of influenza. After keeping vigil by her
daughter's bedside for a month and watching her beloved child die, Elizabeth penned these
mournful words:
"When someone you love has
died, the gates have suddenly opened onto eternity, all natural life has trembled and collapsed, yesterday's laws have been
abolished, desires have faded, meaning
has become meaningless, and another incomprehensible meaning has grown wings on
their backs..... Everything flies into the black
maw of the fresh grave: hopes, plans, calculations, above all, meaning, the meaning of a whole life. If this is
so, then everything has to be reconsidered,
everything rejected, seen in its corruptibility and falseness. "
In Paris, more and more moved by religious impulse after the
deaths of her daughters, she completed a course of study at the St.
Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute by correspondence, and in 1932
became a lay nun, taking the name Maria. She became aware that God was calling her to become a mother to all
people who would cross her path. She felt that she was to share the love she
had for her daughter with all people, especially "for all who need maternal care, assistance, or protection," as
she said. While her husband supported the family by driving a taxi, Elizabeth devoted herself
more and more to social work and theological writing. Perhaps a result of their
daughter's death, Elizabeth's
second marriage to Daniel Skobstov was dying and they soon separated.
Elizabeth acquired a position with an agency that assisted Russian
refugees living in France
and saw first-hand the poverty and dire circumstances in which they lived. With
two failed marriage behind her, Elizabeth
searched for what her true vocation in life was to be. With the support of her
bishop, Metropolitan Evlogy, she began to consider the monastic life. But she
felt herself drawn to a new form of monastic life, one that combined prayer and
contemplation with service to those in need around her. She was tonsured a nun
in 1932 and given the name Maria. Metropolitan Evlogy blessed her to
devote herself to a new kind of monastic life, what she called "monasticism
in the world." She opened a house of hospitality in Paris to serve the poor, the homeless, the
desperate. She was not content to simply wait for the needy to ring her
doorbell but traveled the back alleys and bars of Paris seeking out those in need of her
maternal care. She entered those places where other people were simply afraid
to go; she found beggars and drunkards, took them to her home, washed, clothed,
and fed them.
The last phase of Mother Maria's
life began when the German Nazis conquered and occupied France during World War II. While
it would have been possible for her to flee France
as the Germans were advancing toward Paris,
she refused to leave. "If the Germans
take Paris, I
shall stay here with my old women. Where else could I send them?"
Mother Maria joined some colleagues in
preparing and dispatching food parcels and
funds to families of more than 1,000 Russian
émigrés who were imprisoned by the Nazis.Early in 1942 the Nazis began
their registration of Jews. Jews began to knock on the door of the house of
hospitality asking if the chaplain, Father Dimitri Klepinine, would issue fake
baptismal certificates to save their lives. With the support of Mother Maria,
Father Dmitri issued the fake documents, convinced that Christ would do the
same. When the order came from Berlin
that the yellow star must be worn by all Jews, many French Christians felt that
this was not their concern since it was not a Christian problem. Mother Maria
replied, "There is no such thing as a Christian problem. Don't you realize
that the battle is being waged against Christianity? If we were true Christians
we would all wear the Star. The age of confessors has arrived."
She also hid Jews at Lourmel and forged
documents for them.
In July, 1942, mass arrests of
Jews began to take place--12,884 were arrested of whom 6,900 were children.
They were held prisoner in the
Velodrome d’Hiver, Paris’ sports stadium, just a kilometer from Mother
Maria's house, before they were sent to Auschwitz.
With her monastic robe gaining her entrance, she spent three days at the sports
stadium distributing food and clothing and even managing to smuggle out some
children by bribing garbage collectors to hide them in trash cans. Her house of
hospitality was literally bursting at the seams with people, many of them Jews.
Mother Maria remarked, "It is amazing
that the Germans haven't pounced on us yet." She also said that if
anyone came looking for Jews she would show them an icon of the Mother of God.
On February 8, 1943 the Nazis did pounce and
arrested Mother Maria, her son Yuri, Father Dmitri, and their helper, Elia
Fondaminski. In the pocket of Yuri was found a letter from a Jewish family
asking for a false baptismal certificate.
Father Dmitri was interrogated by
Hans Hoffinan, a Gestapo officer. A portion of the interrogation has been
preserved:
Hoffman: If we release you, will you give your word never again to aid Jews?
Father Dimitri: I can do no such thing. I am a Christian and must act as I must.
(Hoffinan struck the priest across the face.)
Hoffman: Jew lover! How dare you talk of helping those swine as being a Christian duty!
Father Dimitri: (holding up the cross from his cassock): Do you know this Jew?
For this Father Dimitri was knocked to the floor.
Mother Maria and those arrested with her were all sent to concentration camps--the men to Buchenwald and Dora and Mother Maria to Ravensbruck. There, as prisoner Number 19263, she continued her ministry among her companions, with the strength of her faith giving them encouragement and love in the midst of hopelessness and despair. Finally, Maria, her health broken, could no longer pass the roll call on Good Friday 1945. She stepped into the line with those women condemned to die, hoping to inspire them to meet their fate with faith in God. As one witness wrote, “She offered herself consciously to the holocaust . . . thus assisting each one of us to accept the cross. . . . She radiated the peace of God and communicated it to us.” Mother Maria Skobtsova was killed in the gas chamber at Ravensbruck concentration camp on March 31, 1945, Holy Saturday, only a week before the camp was liberated.In 1985, Yad Vashem recognized her as Righteous Among the Nations
for her work saving Jews from the Holocaust, and in 2004, with some
controversy, she was a former socialist revolutionary who was twice-married for
starters, and she remained an intellectual of leftist bent throughout
her life, the fact that she smoked, and her somewhat heterodox preaching, the Russian
Orthodox Church canonized her as a martyred saint.
