St. Maria Skobtsova

St. Maria Skobtsova was born Elizaveta Pilenko on 20 December 1891 in Riga in the Russian Empire. A poet and revolutionary in her restless youth, twice married and a mother, she passed through great personal sorrow, including the death of a child, on her way to a profound Christian faith. Emigrating to Paris after the Revolution, she became an Orthodox nun in 1932, taking the name Maria, but chose a monasticism lived not behind cloister walls but in the streets among the poor.

She opened houses of hospitality in Paris to shelter the destitute, the refugees, and the despairing of the Russian emigration, feeding and caring for all who came. When the Nazis occupied France, she and her chaplain, Father Dimitri Klepinin, and her son Yuri sheltered and helped to rescue Jews, issuing them false baptismal certificates and hiding them. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died on 31 March 1945, by tradition taking the place of another woman in the gas chamber. She was glorified as a saint and martyr in 2004.