St. Maria Skobtsova - 1891 - 1945

St. Maria Skobtsova, born on December 20. 1891, was a Russian intellectual, poet, and reformer who fled Russia with her family after the Revolution. She ended up in Paris where she devoted herself to assisting members of the Russian exile community, who were often demoralized, impoverished, and lost. When her young daughter became ill and died, while her marriage was collapsing, her personal crisis led to a deep growth in faith and commitment to Christ and the Gospel. She asked the Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Paris if she could become a nun, not in a cloistered community but out in the world to serve people who struggled to survive in Paris – the homeless, people with addictions, prostitutes. Providentially, he agreed and gave her his blessing and support. She opened a house of hospitality, where homeless people found a compassionate refuge. She worked tirelessly, going by streetcar each morning to the public market (Les Halles) to beg for whatever leftover provisions she could, hauling them back to the house herself. By night, she went to the cafes of Paris to drink coffee and talk, as Jesus had, to those who were outcasts, drinkers, women of the street, and others. When Paris fell to the Nazis and they began rounding up Jews, she and her chaplain Fr Dimitri and her son Yuri (George) took them in and provided them with refuge and sometimes faked baptismal certificates. When thousands of Jews were crammed into a huge stadium to be processed and shipped to death camps, Mother Maria, Fr Dimitri, Yuri and other helpers went into the stadium to minister to their needs. Given the opportunity to cease and desist by the Nazis, they refused and were themselves sent off to the same death camps. In the Ravensbruck Camp, Mother Maria continued to comfort and care for her fellow inmates. IN 1945, with the liberation of the camp by the advancing Allied forces in sight, Mother Maria – according to verbal testimonies – took the place of a very distraught woman in the line of those who were to be gassed and went sacrificially to her death. She died as she had lived, literally following Christ in His ministry, in His Passion and Death. Fittingly, her death took place sometime during the last days of March, 1945, in the prelude to Holy Week and Pascha.