Who Was St. Maria of Paris? Mother Maria Skobtsova and Nazi-Occupied France

In the spring of 1945 a Russian nun died in the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin. Two years earlier she had been arrested in Paris, where her house of hospitality on the rue de Lourmel fed the hungry and, under the German occupation, hid Jews. Her son and her priest died in the camps too. Orthodox Christians now call her St Maria of Paris, and Yad Vashem honors her as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

She was also a poet, a former revolutionary, twice married, a mother who buried a child, and a nun who smoked, missed services to answer the door, and wrote sharply about the piety of her own Church. Some contemporaries were scandalized. This article tells her life as the Church remembers it, then asks what the documents can confirm and where the popular story runs ahead of the evidence.

In brief

Elizaveta Pilenko (1891 to 1945), a poet who lost her faith as a teenager and found it again before the Revolution, fled the Russian Civil War and settled in Paris in 1923. After her young daughter died in 1926 she gave herself to poor Russian émigrés, and in 1932 she was tonsured as the nun Maria. She did not enter a convent but opened houses of hospitality, finally at 77 rue de Lourmel, calling her vocation "monasticism in the world." Under the occupation she and Fr Dimitri Klepinin sheltered Jews, and he issued false baptismal certificates. Both were arrested in February 1943 with her son Yuri. The men died in the Dora camp in early 1944; she died at Ravensbrück on 31 March 1945. Yad Vashem recognized her and Fr Dimitri as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified them, with Yuri and Ilya Fondaminsky, in 2004, with a feast on 20 July. The core of her story is well documented; some details, above all the claim that she died in another prisoner's place, rest on later memory or conjecture.

Thesis: The documentary record firmly supports Mother Maria's rescue work, arrest and death, while several famous details remain uncertain, so the Church's veneration of her stands on solid historical ground without needing the embellishments.

The life as the Church remembers it

A poet who lost and found God

Elizaveta Pilenko, called Liza, was born in Riga in 1891 and grew up near Anapa on the Black Sea. Her father's death when she was fourteen seemed so unjust that she became an atheist: "If there is no justice," she said, "there is no God." In St Petersburg she joined the symbolist poets around Alexander Blok and the political left. Her 1910 marriage to Dimitri Kuzmin-Karaviev, born, she later said, "more of pity than of love," had collapsed by 1913. Slowly she was drawn back to Christ, and was even allowed to study at the Theological Academy of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, then an all-male school.¹ Her poetry collections Scythian Shards (1912) and Ruth (1916) date from these years.²

In 1918 she was elected deputy mayor of Anapa. Tried by the Whites for collaborating with the Bolsheviks, she told the court, "Red or White, my position is the same." Her judge, Daniel Skobtsov, helped her escape execution, and they married. The family fled through Georgia, where her son Yuri was born in 1920, and Yugoslavia, where her daughter Anastasia was born, reaching Paris in 1923.³

Grief and a new kind of nun

In Paris she made dolls and painted scarves to survive, and found new life in the Russian Student Christian Movement. In the winter of 1926 Anastasia died of meningitis. Jim Forest, introducing an English edition of her writings, quotes a note she wrote then: "No amount of thought will ever result in any greater formulation than the three words, 'Love one another,' so long as it is love to the end and without exceptions."⁴ She resolved "to be a mother for all, for all who need maternal care, assistance, or protection," and from 1930 traveled among destitute Russian refugees across France for the Movement.⁵

Her bishop, Metropolitan Evlogy, who led the Russian parishes of Western Europe, suggested she become a nun. In the spring of 1932, after an ecclesiastical divorce, she was tonsured at the St Sergius Theological Institute in Paris with the name Maria. Metropolitan Evlogy said she took vows "in order to give herself unreservedly to social service"; she called it "monasticism in the world."⁶

The house on the rue de Lourmel

She rented a house at 9 villa de Saxe, slept in the basement so guests could have her room, and painted the icons for its chapel. By 1935 the work had moved to a larger, run-down house at 77 rue de Lourmel, where a stable became a church. She begged for food at Les Halles each morning, and by 1937 the house served up to 120 dinners a day. In 1935 she and friends including Nicholas Berdyaev and Fr Sergei Bulgakov founded "Orthodox Action" to support the work.⁷

In 1937 she wrote an essay, rediscovered only in 1996, on "Types of Religious Lives" among the Orthodox. She does not reject asceticism: "Religious life is always one of asceticism since it demands sacrifices in the name of higher spiritual values." But she argues that the Gospel way is self-giving love rooted in the Eucharist, so that "one can speak of the whole of Christianity as of an eternal offering of a Divine Liturgy beyond church walls." In giving oneself to another, "be he someone homeless, sick or incarcerated," she writes, "in him we will encounter Christ Himself face to face."⁸ She is echoing Christ: "inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me" (Matthew 25:40, NKJV).⁹ Our beginner's guide to the Divine Liturgy shows the service she had in mind.

The occupation

In October 1939 Fr Dimitri Klepinin, a young married priest, came to serve the Lourmel church. When the Germans approached Paris she refused to leave: "If the Germans take Paris, I shall stay here with my old women. Where else could I send them?"¹⁰ Yad Vashem's file records that the two "objected vehemently to the anti-Jewish measures" and opened the Lourmel center to the persecuted. Fr Dimitri "issued a large number of false baptismal certificates," and Mother Maria found long-term hiding places for those she sheltered. One Jewish hostage they helped, the historian Georges Wellers, testified that after Fr Dimitri gave his wife a false certificate in March 1942, "I was not deported [before June 30, 1944], nor was my wife nor our children."¹¹ {{strong: Mother Maria and Fr Dimitri sheltered Jews at the rue de Lourmel and Fr Dimitri issued false baptismal certificates.}}

In mid-July 1942 the French police rounded up thousands of Paris Jews and held many of them in the Vélodrome d'Hiver sports arena before deporting them, via Drancy, to Auschwitz.¹² According to Yad Vashem, on 17 July Mother Maria used her standing as a nun to get past the police. She could offer only moral support to a young friend held there, but with the help of the street cleaners working in the stadium she enabled the friend's three children, two boys and a girl, to escape. A shorter Yad Vashem summary says she smuggled children out "in garbage bins."¹³

Arrest and the camps

On 8 February 1943 the Gestapo searched the rue de Lourmel and found in Yuri's pocket a letter asking Fr Dimitri for a false baptismal certificate. Yuri was held hostage; Fr Dimitri served the Liturgy and gave himself up the next day, and on 10 February Mother Maria was arrested.¹⁴ In April the prisoners were moved to Compiègne, where she saw Yuri for the last time. From there she was deported to Ravensbrück, and the two men later to Buchenwald and then Dora. Yuri was sent away "for treatment," a camp euphemism for death, on 6 February 1944, and Fr Dimitri died of pneumonia days later. Their friend Ilya Fondaminsky, a Jewish-born intellectual who was baptized while interned at Compiègne, died at Auschwitz on 19 November 1942.¹⁵

At Ravensbrück she led discussions and Bible readings; Jacqueline Péry recalled that they "provided an escape from the hell in which we lived." Weakened, she was moved in early 1945 to the "youth camp" for the sick and elderly, returned to the main camp on 3 March, and on 30 March was selected for the gas chamber.¹⁶ The SS had set up a provisional gas chamber there late in 1944 and gassed some 5,000 to 6,000 prisoners between late January and April 1945.¹⁷ She died on 31 March 1945, the Saturday before Western Easter. Orthodox Pascha fell on 6 May that year, so the often-repeated "Holy Saturday" is true of the Western calendar.¹⁸

The primary historical evidence

Unlike many saints, Mother Maria is known from evidence close to the events, of four kinds.

• Her own writings. Poems, essays and notes from 1912 to 1940, some published in her lifetime and some, like "Types of Religious Lives" (1937), found in family archives and published only in 1997.⁸
• Letters and records from the arrest. Yuri's letters from Compiègne survive; Forest quotes one in which Yuri said he was "absolutely calm, even somewhat proud to share mama's fate."¹⁹
• The Yad Vashem files. Yad Vashem examined testimony, including Wellers's, and recognized Mother Maria on 14 January 1985 and Fr Dimitri on 16 July 1985 (files M.31.2/3078 and 3078/1).²⁰ {{very-strong: Yad Vashem recognized Mother Maria as Righteous Among the Nations on 14 January 1985, and Fr Dimitri Klepinin on 16 July 1985.}}
• Survivors' memories. Fellow prisoners such as Péry and Solange Périchon, and friends such as Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), wrote or spoke about her after the war.

The standard English biography is Fr Sergei Hackel's Pearl of Great Price (1982), Forest's principal source; the OCA's life of the saint closely follows Forest.²¹

What can we actually verify?

(a) Contemporary or near-contemporary documentary evidence

Her prewar life, profession and houses are attested by her own writings and by those who worked with her. Her rescue work is confirmed by Yad Vashem, whose file rests on testimony such as Wellers's. Her arrest in February 1943, her deportation to Ravensbrück and her death there on 31 March 1945 are agreed by every source consulted.

The sources do not agree on everything. Yad Vashem's narrative gives Fr Dimitri's death as 9 February 1944, while its own database entry gives 11 February, and the Forest and OCA accounts imply 10 February. The canonization was decided on 16 January 2004 according to the Synodal Act and an OCA news report of that year, but the OCA's life of the saint and Forest give 18 January.²²

(b) Later tradition and memory

Several of the best-known stories are later memories retold through Hackel and Forest: Fr Dimitri, struck by a Gestapo officer, holding up his cross and asking, "Do you know this Jew?"; her words about the yellow star, "If we were true Christians we would all wear the Star"; and the rubbish-bin rescue from the Vel d'Hiv. Yad Vashem supports the rescue in a more modest form: three children, with the street cleaners' help. {{moderate: That Mother Maria helped children escape the Vel d'Hiv with the help of street cleaners.}}

The most famous detail, that she went to the gas chamber in place of another prisoner, rests on thin evidence. The OCA life says plainly that accounts "are at odds." The 2004 report on the canonization says only that "according to certain witnesses" she had taken a fellow prisoner's place. The fullest witness quoted by Forest, Jacqueline Péry, does not claim to have seen it: "It is very possible that [Mother Maria] took the place of a frantic companion. It would have been entirely in keeping with her generous life."²³ Deacon Andrei Psarev, introducing her essay for ROCOR Studies, also calls it "the claim."²⁴ {{debated: That Mother Maria went to her death in place of another prisoner.}} Yad Vashem records her death in the gas chamber, but the circumstances of her last day were not documented.

(c) Reported miracles

Her glorification does not rest on miracles. The Synodal Act uses the Church's general formula about saints "confirmed by God" through signs, but no source consulted names a specific miracle of hers.²⁵

An unconventional nun and her critics

Mother Maria knew she was controversial: "For church circles we are too far to the left," she noted, "while for the left we are too church-minded." Two nuns who joined her from 1937, Mother Evdokia and Mother Blandina, wanted a more traditional rule and left to found what is now the monastery at Bussy-en-Othe; Mother Evdokia found Lourmel too much an "ecclesiastical Bohemia." Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), then a young layman, recalled seeing her in full habit at a café table with a glass of beer and deciding he would never go near her. Yet the same Bloom retold, with evident admiration, a friend's story of how she ironed and mended for Russian workers at Le Creusot before they would hear her lecture on Dostoevsky.²⁶

Criticism also came from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). In 1994 its periodical Pravoslavnaia Rus' printed the memories of Nina Grabbe, which in Psarev's summary left the image of "a sloppily dressed nun, smoking Galoises in a Paris bistro"; she was tonsured, Psarev notes, without her husband's consent. Forest's account says her husband withdrew his objection after meeting Metropolitan Evlogy, so the sources differ.²⁷ Psarev himself cautions against treating such memories as a verdict on "her entire personality."

Some criticism was fair: her community had no enclosure and no abbess, and she could write harshly about other Christians. Yet she also wrote that "one must not judge those who follow other paths."⁸ In glorifying her, the Church did not make her way the rule for monastics; it recognized her love as holiness.

The Orthodox position

What the Church has decided. On 16 January 2004 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, at the request of Archbishop Gabriel of Comane, entered Mother Maria, her son Yuri, Fr Dimitri Klepinin and Ilya Fondaminsky among the saints, with Fr Alexis Medvedkov of Ugine. The Act decrees that those it names, "who ended their life in sanctity and, certainly, in martyrdom," be counted among the saints, and it fixed their common feast on 20 July. The glorification was celebrated at the St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris on 1 and 2 May 2004, with clergy of several jurisdictions.²⁸ The OCA commemorates her on 20 July as "Righteous Martyr Maria."²⁹ For how such decisions are made, see how someone becomes a saint in the Orthodox Church; for the practice of asking saints' prayers, see the saints' intercession in the ancient Church.

Common tradition. Her memory reaches beyond the Church: Paris named a street after her in 2016, near the rue de Lourmel.³⁰ She stands in our Lives of the Saints beside the ancient martyrs.

Theological opinion. Her essays are not dogma. Forest observes that her "verbal assaults on nationalistic and tradition-bound forms of religious life" still provoke many Orthodox Christians.²⁶ Her glorification honors her holiness, not every opinion she wrote.

Her life fits an old pattern: monks have joined prayer and hospitality since the beginning (see where Christian monasticism came from), and her conviction that each person is an image of God connects with the teaching on theosis, union with God by grace.

The strongest objections

"She was a social activist, not a monastic saint"

A traditional Orthodox objection: monasticism means withdrawal, obedience and the cycle of services, and canons bind monastics to their monasteries, so a nun who lived outside any community and often missed services is no model. The answer is that the Church did not canonize her rule of life. It glorified her as a martyr and a righteous woman. In her own essay she defended asceticism, and in the camp she prayed with fellow prisoners, gave away her own food, and ended discussions with Compline.

"False baptismal certificates were lies and an abuse of a sacrament"

Some Christians are uneasy that a priest recorded baptisms that never happened, even entering the names in his register to survive police checks. But he baptized no one; he issued papers to save lives from a regime intent on murder. Christians have long debated deception in such cases, from the Hebrew midwives of Exodus 1 to Rahab. The Church glorified him knowing what he had done, and Yad Vashem honored him for it.

"Was she really a martyr?"

A skeptic might say she died as a political prisoner, not for refusing to deny Christ. But she was arrested for mercy she understood as obedience to Christ, and the Church has long counted as martyrs those who die for keeping Christ's commandments, not only those who refuse to sacrifice to idols.

"Why venerate her at all?"

Protestant readers may admire her yet see no need to call her "saint" or ask her prayers. The Orthodox reply is that honoring the saints honors Christ's work in them. Those who do not share the practice can still read her life as a commentary on Matthew 25.

What we can say confidently

• Elizaveta Skobtsova was tonsured as Mother Maria in Paris in 1932 and ran houses of hospitality, finally at 77 rue de Lourmel.
• She and Fr Dimitri Klepinin sheltered and helped Jews during the occupation; he issued false baptismal certificates.
• She, her son Yuri and Fr Dimitri were arrested in February 1943; all three died in Nazi camps.
• She died at Ravensbrück on 31 March 1945.
• Yad Vashem recognized her (14 January 1985) and Fr Dimitri (16 July 1985) as Righteous Among the Nations.
• The Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified them in January 2004, with a feast on 20 July.

What remains disputed

• Whether she took another prisoner's place in the gas chamber. This rests on conjecture and second-hand report.
• How many children she rescued from the Vel d'Hiv, and how (Yad Vashem's file describes three).
• Exact dates: Fr Dimitri's death (9, 10 or 11 February 1944) and the synod's decision (16 or 18 January 2004).
• Whether her husband consented to her tonsure.
• How far her criticisms of Orthodox piety were fair, a question on which Orthodox writers still differ.

Conclusion

St Maria of Paris does not need legends. The documented facts are enough: a woman who had known unbelief, revolution, exile and the death of a child gave her life to strangers, and then to the persecuted, and died for it with her son and her priest. The Church remembers her alongside the martyrs of the early centuries because her life shows the same truth. Christ's love is not kept inside church walls, and the Liturgy we celebrate is meant to be lived. Whether or not she took another woman's place on her last day, she had been taking other people's places for years. Holy Mother Maria and your companions, pray to God for us.

Notes

1. Orthodox Church in America, "Righteous Martyr Maria (Skobtsova)," Lives of the Saints, 20 July, oca.org. ↩
2. Jim Forest, "Mother Maria Skobtsova: Saint of the Open Door," jimandnancyforest.com (text as updated 8 July 2004); the main part is Forest's introduction to Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003). ↩
3. OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria." ↩
4. Forest, "Saint of the Open Door." Forest does not give the original source of the note; his principal source is Hackel's biography. ↩
5. OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria"; Forest, "Saint of the Open Door." ↩
6. OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria." Forest dates the ecclesiastical divorce to 7 March 1932 and the tonsure "a few weeks later." ↩
7. Forest, "Saint of the Open Door"; OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria." The 1935 date for the move to the rue de Lourmel follows the 2004 report of the canonization (note 25); Forest says "two years later" than 1932. ↩
8. Mother Maria Skobtsova, "Types of Religious Lives" (1937), trans. Fr Alvian Smirensky (revised 1998), from the Russian text in Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniia 176 (1997), published with an editor's introduction by Deacon Andrei Psarev, ROCOR Studies, 31 March 2017. ↩
9. Matthew 25:31-46; verse 40 quoted from the New King James Version. ↩
10. Forest, "Saint of the Open Door"; OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria"; "The Official Act of Canonization" (Fr Dimitri as a young married priest with two children). ↩
11. Yad Vashem, Righteous Among the Nations database, "Skobtsova Yelizaveta (Pilenko)," item 4044235, file M.31.2/3078 (shared narrative with Klepinin, item 4044233). ↩
12. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Paris," Holocaust Encyclopedia, encyclopedia.ushmm.org. ↩
13. Yad Vashem database (note 11), whose wording ("she enabled her three children") most naturally refers to the friend's children; Yad Vashem, Shoah Resource Center, "Skobtsova, Elizaveta (Mother Maria)," yadvashem.org. ↩
14. OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria"; "The Official Act of Canonization," In Communion (Orthodox Peace Fellowship), October 2004, incommunion.org. ↩
15. OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria"; Forest, "Saint of the Open Door"; "The Official Act of Canonization" (for Fondaminsky). ↩
16. Forest, "Saint of the Open Door," quoting Péry's memoir in translation; the original memoir was not consulted. ↩
17. EHRI Portal, "Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück" (institution description), portal.ehri-project.eu. ↩
18. Western Easter 1945 fell on 1 April and Orthodox Pascha on 6 May (computed from the Gregorian and Julian paschal tables; also listed at truecalendar.com). The OCA life calls 30 March "Great, Holy and Good Friday that year." ↩
19. Forest, "Saint of the Open Door." ↩
20. Yad Vashem database, items 4044235 and 4044233 (recognition dates 14/01/1985 and 16/07/1985). ↩
21. Sergei Hackel, Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891-1945 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd; Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1982). Not consulted directly for this article. ↩
22. Yad Vashem database (note 11); OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria"; Forest, "Saint of the Open Door"; "The Official Act of Canonization"; OCA News, "OCA Represented at Glorification of Mother Maria [Skobtsova], Companions in Paris," 12 May 2004. ↩
23. OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria"; "The Official Act of Canonization"; Forest, "Saint of the Open Door." ↩
24. Psarev, editor's introduction (note 8). ↩
25. "The Official Act of Canonization." ↩
26. Forest, "Saint of the Open Door." ↩
27. Psarev, editor's introduction (note 8); Forest, "Saint of the Open Door." ↩
28. "The Official Act of Canonization"; OCA News, 12 May 2004. ↩
29. OCA, "Righteous Martyr Maria." ↩
30. "A special event in Paris: Street named after an Orthodox Saint," OrthoChristian.com (from Basilica News Agency), 4 April 2016. ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Skobtsova, Mother Maria. "Types of Religious Lives" (1937). Trans. Alvian Smirensky. ROCOR Studies, 31 March 2017, with an editor's introduction by Deacon Andrei Psarev. rocorstudies.org.
• Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings. Introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003.
• Ecumenical Patriarchate, Holy Synod. Act of canonization, 16 January 2004, in "The Official Act of Canonization," In Communion, Orthodox Peace Fellowship, 2004. incommunion.org.
• Yad Vashem. Righteous Among the Nations database: "Skobtsova Yelizaveta (Pilenko)," item 4044235; "Klepinin Dmitri," item 4044233. collections.yadvashem.org.
• Yad Vashem, Shoah Resource Center. "Skobtsova, Elizaveta (Mother Maria)." yadvashem.org.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Orthodox Church in America. "Righteous Martyr Maria (Skobtsova)." Lives of the Saints, 20 July. oca.org.
• Orthodox Church in America. "OCA Represented at Glorification of Mother Maria [Skobtsova], Companions in Paris." OCA News, 12 May 2004. oca.org.
• Forest, Jim. "Mother Maria Skobtsova: Saint of the Open Door." jimandnancyforest.com, 2004.
• Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891-1945. London: Darton, Longman and Todd; Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1982.
• "A special event in Paris: Street named after an Orthodox Saint." OrthoChristian.com, 4 April 2016.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Paris." Holocaust Encyclopedia. encyclopedia.ushmm.org.
• European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). "Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück." EHRI Portal. portal.ehri-project.eu.

Critical voices within Orthodoxy

• Psarev, Andrei. Editor's introduction to Mother Maria Skobtsova, "Types of Religious Lives." ROCOR Studies, 2017 (reporting Nina Grabbe's letter in Pravoslavnaia Rus', no. 13, 1994).