Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 71

8 December 1891—31 March 1945

The Giving of One’s Soul

Like so many other Russian refugees fleeing from the Bolshevik Revolution, Maria Skobtsova made her way to Paris. The disruption of her old life and the additional blow of the death of one of her three children provoked a profound spiritual crisis in the woman known in Russia as a poet and political activist. She began a search for a more “purified” way of life that eventually led her, in 1932, to monastic vows in the Orthodox Church.

But as a nun, she refused to live a cloistered life. Instead, she ministered to the poverty-stricken and spiritually despairing refugees in Paris. She rented a large house and opened it up to the hungry and the homeless, reserving for herself only a cot in the basement. Her goal, she said, was to discern and revere the living God in every person she encountered, no matter how broken they were or how great the cost of serving them was. “I think service to the world is simply the giving of one’s own soul in order to save others.”

Hitler launched his signature blitzkrieg attack against France in May 1940. Five weeks later, the Nazis were in Paris and the persecution of Jews began. With no hesitation, Skobtsova began defying the Nazis by offering shelter and assistance to Jews on the run. She worked closely with an Orthodox priest, Father Dimitri Klepinin, who gladly issued baptismal papers to Jews who requested them. Together, the two of them moved fleeing Jews along escape routes to Switzerland. On more than one occasion, they smuggled Jewish children to safety by hiding them in trash bins and bribing garbage collectors to take them out of the city.

In 1942, French Jews were ordered to wear the infamous yellow star. Skobtsova immediately protested and called Christians to display solidarity with their Jewish brothers and sisters. “If we were true Christians,” she said, “we would all wear the Star.” Although she hated war, seeing it as “the brutalization of nations, the lowering of the cultural level, the loss of creative ability, the decadence of souls” that “throws the whole of mankind back,” she also believed that it offered a profound opportunity to serve and sacrifice for war’s victims.

For Skobtsova, the sacrifice came in February 1943 when she, Father Dimitri, and her son Yura, a collaborator in their aid to the Jews, were arrested by the Gestapo. They were interrogated and tortured. Skobtsova was eventually sent to Ravensbrück and Dimitri and Yura to Buchenwald. All three of them perished in the camps, Skobtsova surviving until 31 March 1945. She was sent to the gas chamber just days before the camp was liberated. During her two years at Ravensbrück, she ministered to her fellow prisoners, and there is testimony that she died taking the place of another prisoner who had been “selected” for the gas chamber. If so, Skobtsova’s manner of dying, like her manner of living, exemplified her dedication to serving others.