Saint Maria Skobtsova of Paris.

Saint Maria Skobtsova was a child of God, and like all saints so she also surpassed obstacles, carried a heavy burden like the Mount Ararat on her shoulders and lived a life of refusing the comforts of this world and offering her life to the needy wherever she would meet them.

We met Melita Antoniadou, iconographer, painter and illustrator, the first Greek that researched the life of this amazing  woman by traveling to the areas where Saint Maria lived and martyred during the period of WW2. Melita narrated to us, for the sake of an article in Orthodox Truth, how she was inspired to start this investigative journey following Saint Maria’s footsteps. “Many years ago, my kumbara (I am godmother to her daughter) gave me a book, the biography of Mother Maria Skobtsova. The subtitle was “A Fool for Christ in Modern Times”. It was the nicest present. I read it time and again, underlying, copying, and offering it to others as a present myself.

She was a most unique, strong, multifaceted personality, free and uncompromising, totally devoted to love of one’s neighbor. The way she ended her life was fitting to the way she lived it: she sealed her life with martyrdom in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1945.

Poet, painter, iconographer, mayor, wife and mother to 3 children, later a nun, brilliant theologian and protectress of thousands of destitute people, playwright, even of a scenario for a movie - she was especially drawn to fools for Christ, because, as she used to say, “This path may be difficult, but offers us the unbound happiness to feel the hand of God in everything we do”.

She was born in Riga and raised in Anapa, a seaside town of the Black Sea, where she served as Mayor, as indeed her father earlier, from where she had to escape with her family, hidden in a cargo ship, ending up, after many adventures, in Paris, to be later named, Saint Maria of Paris. Her parents, devoted Christians, shaped their daughter’s values, sensitivities and goals, although her daring nature didn’t just follow their footsteps, but placed them in front of tough wrestling trials with God. As one of her contemporaries, Mokoulskii, mentions: “She doesn’t recognize nature’s laws, she doesn’t know what cold means, she stays without food or sleep for days on end, she defies sickness or fatigue, she loves danger, she ignores fear and hates any form of comfort, whether it be spiritual or material”

I read this testimony in the book at hand, which was followed by a poem St. Maria wrote:

I searched for singers and prophets

That wait by the stairway to heaven

They see signs of the mystical end,

They sing, elusive for us, songs.

And I found people restless, orphaned, poor,

Drunk, desolate, useless,

Lost in any of their taken paths,

Homeless, naked, breadhungry.

There are no prophesies. Only life

Incessantly plays the role of the prophet.

The end is near, the days are shortened.

You took a slave’s form. Hosanna!

Her biographer, Sergei Hakel, had gathered extracts from her writings, which made such an impression on me that I wanted to know more about this marvelous woman - to get to know her life and her way of thinking. She, who exemplified with her own life all that she wrote, so brilliantly, about the true nature of the Church, about what it means for one to commune the body of Christ - and what it means to sicken it, by confining it in the narrow boundaries of moralism and typolatry that know how to weigh and measure, but not how to set free and give new life.

“Now, she writes, I am absolutely aware that every theory, however important, inevitably carries less value and is less needed than any practical deed, no matter how unimpressive. This is the real situation, the demands of which I first and foremost experience with such intensity.”

In the statute of Orthodox Action, an organization that was formed in order to help Russian refugees, she paraphrased the same thoughts: “We are endowed with secondary targets and we intend to devote ourselves to anything secondary”.

Melita Antoniadou received the book that narrated St. Maria’s life in 2003. Her first thought was that, since the saint passed away when she was 54-years-old, in 1945, there should be still some people alive who had met her. A Belarusian friend of hers, Greta Nikitina, gave her the phone number of a young man in Paris, Basile Arkhipoff, who descended from Russian emigres and had close relations to ACER - the Russian Christian Student Movement or Movement of Christian Youth, which saint Maria had joined when she settled in Paris. So Paris became the first stop for her research.

“I soon found myself in Paris, where I met this fine young man, who told me that the daughter of the close associate of Saint Maria, Saint Dimitri Klepinin, Elene Arjakovsky-Klepinin, had all the archives of Saint Maria, and lived in Germany in the student town of Tubingen. I called her and she agreed to meet me at first opportunity. I decided to travel by car to Germany that summer, via Patras-Ancona (Greece to Italy). In Berlin, good old friends from my student years in England, who had since become a charming family with 3 children, were expecting me. The husband, Jens, believed that the Germans had better look their past straight in the eye, so that the shameful events of WW2 would never be repeated. So, he would take his children, since they were very young, to visit the concentration camps.

Ravensbrück was famous -infamous- for the cruelties that took place there. It was the worst women’s Nazi camp. We went to the camp, which had been reconstructed in the 80s, where apart from the remaining buildings, there were the chambers filled with triple bunk beds, where about 100 prisoners were packed in each chamber; the execution corridors where some prisoners were shot; the huge rolling stones that the prisoners were forced to push for 10 to 12 hours a day; the yard where they were forced to stand for ages, the workplaces for sewing, etc.; the crematoria with the furnaces where the dead bodies of the gassed prisoners (in the gas chambers) were burned. The furnaces had a big tag in front with the name and address of the maker, so that if one needed to order some, they could do so easily... There are no words to describe that sight. In front of the furnaces, some of the victims’ relatives had placed a plaque with the name of their loved ones who lost their lives there. There was nothing for Saint Maria. The only thing of hers was in the display room, a small showcase with her handicraft, an embroidered handkerchief and an Orthodox prayer rope with knots. The woman in charge eagerly photocopied the details of the prisoner we asked for.

Next stop, Tubingen, in order to meet Helene Arjakovsky-Klepinin. Even though the German highways are famous for being flawless, toll-less and speed limit-less in many areas, something which made me think that I will make the trip from North to South in a flash, a rainstorm caused the collapse of a major bridge, resulting in a huge delay. I was stuck in the middle of nowhere (the cars formed ten mile lines) for 7 hours. When I finally reached Helene’s home, I expected and old lady to greet me. I was surprised to see a good looking woman around 60! Polite, highly educated and pleasant. It didn’t take long for her to make me feel at home, and there we sat, squatting, surrounded by boxes with archives from the times of Lourmel (the Parisian monastery, which Mother Maria had founded and in which Father Dmitri, Helene’s father, had served in the years before the war broke off).

She showed me the star that the Nazis commanded the Jews to wear, and the baptism certificates that her father issued to the Jews so that they may pass as Christians and escape persecution (this was the reason they were arrested: Mother Maria, Father Dmitri, Yuri, Mother Maria’s son, and Ilia Fondaminsky, an Jewish convert, who tirelessly worked alongside them for the relief and protection of all kinds of desolate people, who found refuge in this atypical monastery in the heart of Paris). Helene possessed all the letters that were saved from the various concentration camps, in which they were sent - of Helene’s father, Mother 

Maria’s, Yuri’s and Ilias’s.

Father Dmitri Klepinin writes in a letter, that the Grace of God, Which they lived in the camp was such that he would not change the time he spent in that place of martyrdom for anything in the world (and which cost him, and the rest of the group, their lives). Helene had already given the theological writings of Mother Maria to be translated into English. Jim Forest, American writer and publisher of the Orthodox magazine, “In Communion”, would write the Introduction. Helene reassured me that those writings were her most important collection of St. Maria’s theological thought, so I couldn’t wait to lay my eyes on them. But these were just a few of the total of her works, which were published much later in French, and now are being translated into Greek. Helene told me that Mother Maria didn’t hesitate to send her articles to whomever would ask for them, even if this or that magazine or newspaper didn’t have the best reputation. Somewhere, someone would take a “bite”. This was her way of seeing things. As she didn’t hesitate to go to the infamous Paris districts to help young desperate young women that sought some support in order to escape prostitution. For one such girl that was hosted in the monastery, she came into conflict with sister Evdokia who lived there, and who, shocked with Mother Maria’s practices, got up and left.

I mentioned to Helene that there is no plaque in Ravensbrück devoted to Mother Maria’s memory, and the next year she wrote to me, happy to say that a committee in Paris took on the construction of such a plaque. There was a fundraiser, and when it was ready they would go on a pilgrimage to Ravensbrück together with their bishop. This was later established as an annual pilgrimage, after Maria Skobtsova was officially pronounced a Saint by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, together with her son Yuri, Father Dmitri and Ilia Fondaminsky.

Back in Paris, I visited Lourmel Street, where, unfortunately, nothing remains today of Saint Maria’s monastery (since the place was rented), apart from a plaque at the entrance of an apartment building that was built in its place, to remind us what it once had been. The altar and the icons, painted or embroidered by Mother Maria, are now in the Orthodox Church of Saint Seraphim of Sarov in another Parisian district.

When I visited it, I met an elderly female sexton, who remembered Saint Maria well, because her mother served in Lourmel and she’d take her along every day. “She was a fearless woman”, the old lady told me. “Tireless, she didn’t care about herself in the least. She would go around with a soiled from various chores cassock, and with a broad smile almost never leaving her face. Her embrace was as broad, as she was very expressive. Tall and strong built, she radiated warmth to everyone, but she also didn’t hesitate to speak strongly, when she disagreed with something. She didn’t take care to do things covertly, she spoke openly about Nazis and made loud declarations about the injustice against the Jews. She moreover regarded that all Christians should wear David’s star in support of the Jews, since Christ was also a Jew and David’s descendant. If she took precautions, she may have been saved from the Gestapo, but death was not what she feared, as she possessed a resurrected soul”.

I didn’t keep the sexton’s name, but I will not forget her luminous presence and the familiarity I felt near her.

A very important encounter was the one with Elisabeth Behr-Siegel (a meeting made possible with the kind intervention of Michael Stavrou, a theologian at the French Institute of Saint Serge in Paris - her frailty forced her kin to keep visits scarce). I had the good fortune to visit her in her humble dwellings, a small apartment in a second rate Paris district. (All the notable Russian emigre scholars that I met, as were the Losskys, lived in small, humble apartments, full of books and photos, decorated in the refined taste of old gentry, reminiscent of their origin).

Her daughter, Nadine, brought us tea. Elisabeth, 97 years old, was preparing a lecture which she would deliver in Oxford in a few days. Radiant and dynamic, despite the aged body, she spoke to me about how they would secretly meet with Mother Maria in various houses, how they hid Jews in attics and basements, how they gathered money to arrange their escape to Switzerland or England, how they made false documents and identity cards, but also how Mother Maria couldn’t quit smoking and in her efforts, she dreamt of ashtrays full of cigarette buds... And there she laughed out loud. “Hmm, how not! Can you imagine the tension she lived in? How many issues she took care of every day, and at the same time, she was daily rushing to gather food for the common meal, to beg for money for the endless needs... I know, I know, the pious Christians are shocked by these things!” And she laughed again, more lightly. “What kind of person was she? She was the person that didn’t care for half measures”, she said. “That’s why she would say: One cannot be a measured Christian”.

Ten days after my visit, Elisabeth Behr-Siegel left this world. She didn’t make it to Oxford for the talk. Like a small bird, with a book in hand, she flew away in her bed. I am grateful that I met her on time in this world.

In the Netherlands, in Alkmaar, I stayed in the hospitable home of Jim and Nancy Forest for a few days. The book with the most important writings of Saint Maria had just been published in English. Jim offered me the rights for the long introduction narrating her life, which he had written. My translation and its publication in Greek followed. According to her heart, to her life, to that which she herself declared in her writings, the title contained the word “sacrifice”, which suited her best. As she wrote: “No amount of thought will ever be able to result in a greater formulation than the three words: “Love one another”, so long as it is love to the end and without exceptions.”

From the writings of saint Maria of Paris we offer one more excerpt titled:

THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO LIVE

You can walk on earth in an entirely legitimate and dignified manner: to count, weigh and plan for the future. But it is also possible to walk on water. Then, it is impossible to count and plan the future. The only thing necessary is to believe incessantly. A moment of doubt and you start to sink in”.

Oral tradition has it that Saint Maria took the place of a Jewish mother with children in the line of prisoners to be led to the crematoria in sacrifice.

We feel grateful for all that Melita Antoniadou passed on to us together with the photographic material, but also for the opportunity to contemplate and admire how there are people that gave up their lives in the world and became saints, lived heavenly lives on Earth and lessened themselves so that the Holy Grace would flow through them to the rest of the people, so that the world may be nourished and light shed into the shadows, comforting human sorrow.

_____________

Sophia Chatzi

Published in Greek newspaper ORTHODOX TRUTH

Original text in Greek : http://apantaortodoxias.blogspot.com/2018/10/blog-post_296.html