One of the most inspiring, though tragic, stories of altruism is that of a Russian-born nun of aristocratic parentage whom circumstances place in Paris when France came under Nazi rule.
Elizabeta Skobtsova was born in Riga, Latvia (at that time part of Russia), to a father who was chief prosecutor for the tsarist government in that city. In her youth she wrote poetry; one of her works, "Scythian Shards," was well-known in St. Petersburg literary circles. During the Revolution, she joined the Socialist Revolutionary party, but when the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand, she left for Anapa on the Black Sea coast. There she married and bore two children to an anti-Bolshevik officer. the vicissitudes of the Russian Civil War caused them to flee. They eventually settled in France. Established in Paris, Elizabeta, after the death of her four-year-old daughter, decided to become a nun in the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1932 she took her vows and adopted the name of Maria.
Until the outbreak of the war, she coordinated welfare activities on behalf of the Russian émigrés in France. This led to the opening of a dormitory and free kitchen for Russian exiles and of a convalescent home outside of Paris. Her church purchased a building in Paria, on Rue de Lourmel, which soon became the nerve center of her extensive activities. Her immediate aide was Father Dmitri Klepinin, also a refugee from Russia.
With the onset of the persecution of the Jews in France by the Germans, she decided that her Christian belief required her to come to the aid of Jews in whatever way possible. As a first step, she made the free kitchen available to them, the arranged temporary shelter for some. Father Klepinin, ever at her side, issued - unbeknownst to his superiors - false baptismal certificates for those needed new identities. During the fateful days of July 1942, when thousands of Parisian Jews were rounded up in the Velodrome d'Hiver, in conditions of indescribable suffering, Mother Maria succeeded in penetrating the sports stadium and, with the connivance of bribed garbage collectors, smuggled out several children in tall narrow garbage bins. That same month, stunned by the German edict requiring Jews to wear the yellow star, she penned the following poem:
Unrelenting in her charitable zeal, she continued her work on behalf of Jews in spite of ominous warnings that she was being closely watched by the Gestapo. She simply could not relent, she confided to friends. She kept a diary, writing late at night after a full day of activities. The following passage gives her testimony of her state of mind: "There is one moment when you start burning with love and you have the inner desire to throw yourself at the feet of some other human being. This one moment is enough. Immediately you know that instead of losing you life, it is being given back to you twofold."
On February 8, 1943 she and Father Klepinin were arrested. She readily admitted the charge of helping Jews elude Nazi roundups. When Klepinin was brought in for interrogation, Hoffmann, the Gestapo agent decided at first on a conciliatory approach; it backfired, as the following dialogue testifies:
Hoffman: If we release you, will you give an undertaking never again to aid Jews?
Klepinin: I can say no such thing. I am a Christian and must act as I must.
(Hoffman strikes Klepinin across the face.)
Hoffman: Jew lover! How dare you talk of helping those swine as being a Christian duty!
(Klepinin recovers his balance. He raises the cross from his cassock and faces Hoffman.)
Klepinin: Do you know this Jew?
Klepinin received an additional blow which landed him on the floor. He and Mother Maria were taken to Compiegne. Klepinin was then transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp and from there to Dora camp, where he died on pneumonia on February 11, 1944. Mother Maria was taken to the notorious Ravensbruck women's concentration camp, north of Berlin. On March 31, 1945, days before the camp's liberation, her strength failed her and she was committed to the gas chamber.
Years earlier, Mother Maria wrote, "At the Last Judgment, I will not be asked whether I satisfactorily practiced asceticism, or how many genuflections I have made before the divine altar. I will be asked whether I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick and the prisoner in his jail. That is all that will be asked."
from:
"The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust", Mordecai Paldiel, KTAV Publishing House, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, Copyright 1993
Reprinted with permission by the publisher, 1998