Mother Maria (Skobtsova) was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris on this day in 1943. At one point in my time as an editor of the Holy Trinity Monastery biweekly periodical Pravoslavnaia Rusʹ, we published a letter from Sao Paolo, written by Nina Grabbe (no. 13, 1994). In it, Grabbe, a contemporary of Mother Maria (Skobtsova), shared her memories of this Russian nun. Mother Maria had the outward appearance of a sloppily dressed nun, smoking Galoises in a Paris bistro. This image was imprinted in the reminiscences of the shocked contemporary that we had published. Nothing else beyond being scandalized was mentioned in that letter. Similarly to Nikolay Lossky, about whom I wrote a couple of days ago, Elizaveta Pilenko (the future Mother Maria) was born in Latvia, in Riga, in 1891. At the time, Riga was the fifth-largest city of the Russian Empire. Similarly to Nikolay Lossky, she progressed from socialism toward idealism. Mother Maria was indeed not a typical nun. She was tonsured in 1932 at the church of the St. Sergius Podvorie (a monastic representation of Holy Trinity St. Sergius Lavra) in Paris by Metropolitan Evlogii (Georgievskii). She did not belong to any monastic community, lived in the world, was tonsured without her husband’s consent, and had her 12 year–old son Yuri and 19-year-old daughter Gaiana with her. Nevertheless, Nun Maria’s podvig in France bears some similarities to that of St. John in China. There, she looked after destitute Russian refugees. Her Christian attitude toward National Socialism resembles that of St. Alexander (Schmorell) of Munich. During the German occupation, her shelter on Rue Lourmel in Paris and a sanatorium in the Parisian suburb of Noisy-le-Grand were turned into shelters for Jews and prisoners of war. Mother Maria and Fr. Dimitri Klepinin also issued fictitious baptismal certificates to Jews, which sometimes helped. On February 8, 1943, the Gestapo arrested her son Yurii and the next day Mother Maria herself. Mother Maria died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in March of 1945, after the liberation of Paris. The Nazis murdered other members of her circle in France at different times: Elias Fondaminsky in 1942, Priest Dimitry Klepinin and Yurii Skobstov in 1944. In 2004, the Ecumenical Patriarchate canonized all of them in the synaxis of the Russian émigré saints of France. Canonized along with them was the righteous priest Aleksei Medvedkov (+1934), who selflessly ministered to Russian refugees in Ugine. His remains were discovered to be incorrupt. The Russian Orthodox Church has yet to canonize any of them. Relevant Resources: Mother Maria (Skobtsova), “Types of Religious Lives,” Historical Studies of the Russian Church Abroad. Yuri P. Grabbe, “At the Twilight of Jewish Power,” Historical Studies of the Russian Church Abroad. | 
