Would you be willing to hide young children in trashcans to provide them with a safe place to live? This was one of the many unselfish acts of Mother Maria of Skobtsova. Elizaveta Pilenko was born into a very rich family on December 8, 1891 in Riga, Livonia, present day Latvia. At the age of 15, after the unexpected death of her father, her mother moved the family to St. Petersburg. Elizaveta was so distraught after his death that she became an atheist, and aimlessly wandered the streets of St. Petersburg. A cousin took Elizaveta to her first poetry reading, in an effort to help her deal with feelings of anger and grief. It was during this time that she wrote her first two free verse poems, which resulted in the publication of her first volume of poetry, Scythian Potsherds, four years later.
At the age of nineteen, in 1910, she married her first husband, Dmitri Vladimirovich Kuzmin-Karavaev, but in a short time the marriage ended. (Many years later, Dmitri would become a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.) By 1913, the marriage had collapsed, and Elizaveta's mother moved the family to Anapa, in Southern Russia. In the fall of 1913, her first child, a daughter, Gayana, was born. When Elizaveta was twenty- seven, she became mayor of Anapa. During her mayoral term, she was arrested and tried for being a Bolshevik. During the trial she met Daniel Skobtsova, who presided as judge. After her acquittal, she fell in love, and married Daniel. Due to political turmoil, her family decided to flee the country. The first stop in their journey was the country of Georgia, where their first son, Yuri, was born. The journey continued to Yugoslavia, where a daughter, Anastasia, was born. After five years, their journey culminated in Paris, France.
Three years after they arrived in Paris, Anastasia died of influenza. The stress of her daughter's death caused Elizaveta to dedicate her life to the needs of others. With the advice of her bishop, in order to take her monastic vows, she asked Daniel for a divorce. An ecclesiastical divorce was granted, and she professed her monastic vows in 1932 with the guarantee that she would not live in a monastery. She took the name Maria, after St. Mary of Egypt.
Being keenly aware of the needs of society, she founded a social service group called Orthodox Action, which met the needs of the "whole" person. She opened a house for the less fortunate and lonely of Paris. This was just the beginning of her many unselfish acts of kindness. The house provided rooms for the homeless, and many times Mother Maria, because of the lack of space, would sleep by the boiler. One of the rooms was used as an Orthodox chapel, in which Mother Maria painted the icon screen. Divine Liturgies were held on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. So many needy people flocked to the house that it soon became too small, and another building was acquired in 1935, serving more than 22,991 meals that year to those less fortunate.
In World War II, when the Nazis took Paris, the house founded by Mother Maria on the rue de Lourmel became a shelter for many Jews. She was assisted in her work by a young priest, Fr. Dimitri Klepinin, as well as her son Yuri and her mother Sophia. They helped Jews escape, and provided them with necessary documents. On one terrible occasion, the Nazis gathered a huge crowd of Jews into a stadium with little food or water. Mother Maria worked with local trash collectors to get a few children into trash cans and out of the stadium to safe places.
Because her selfless acts went against the extermination plans the Nazis had for all Jews, Mother Maria - prisoner 19263 - was arrested, and along with two hundred other women spent the last two years of her life in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. In order to record the deaths at the camp, she would embroider the names of those tortured on a special cloth, to be displayed in the church at Lourmel. Many times she would trade the bread she received so she could have the thread she needed for her embroidery. She never complained, and often she would bargain for the other prisoners. She believed the daily Eucharist gave her the strength she needed to help others.
Two months before her death, on January 31, 1945, Mother Maria was transferred to Jugendlager, Youth Camp, a kilometer away from Ravensbruck. It was here that no fewer than 50 people died of "natural" causes on a daily basis. The camp was also equipped with a gas chamber that had a capacity of 150 prisoners. Even in the midst of death, Mother Maria worked on her last embroidery project. It depicted the Mother of God with a crucified child in her arms. Mother Maria felt it would help her to leave the camp alive. On Good Friday, in 1945, Mother Maria was selected for death. (Some say she offered herself in exchange for another prisoner.) On the eve of Easter, Mother Maria died in the gas chamber as a martyr.
St Maria of Paris is commemorated on July 20th.
