Maria Skobzowa

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Mother Mary with the philosopher Nikolai Alexandrowitsch Berdjajew

Maria Skobzowa ( Russian Мария Скобцова born when Елизавета Юрьевна Пиленко / Elizabeth Yuryevna Pilenko , second wife Скобцова / Skobzowa ; born December 8 . Jul / 20th December  1891 greg. In Riga , † 31 March 1945 in Ravensbruck ) was a Russian poet , nun and Righteous Among the Nations . During the Second World War she was a member of the French resistance movement . She became known under the name of Mother Maria ( Russian Мать Мария ).

Life

Jelisaveta Pilenko was born in an aristocratic family in Riga. After the death of her father, whom she lost as a teenager, she moved with her mother to Saint Petersburg , where she turned to atheism . In 1910 she married the Bolshevik Dmitri Kuzmin-Karawayev, from whom she divorced in 1913. He later turned to the Orthodox faith, and she now moved with her daughter Gajana to southern Russia, where her religious devotion also increased. She planned to assassinate Leon Trotsky after he closed down the Social Revolutionary Party , but was stopped by colleagues who sent her to Anapa on the Black Sea , where she was mayor for a short time after the October Revolution . Her second husband, Daniel Skobzow, had initially been her teacher and had pardoned her as a judge at a political trial in Anapa, whereupon the two fell in love and married. After fleeing via Georgia and Yugoslavia , she came to Paris in 1923 , where she studied theology . Her daughter Anastasia, born in Yugoslavia, died of the flu in 1926, and their second marriage was soon divorced.

In 1932 she became a nun and took the name Mother Maria , with Sergei Bulgakov as confessor. She turned a tenement house in Paris into her “monastery”, opened it up to refugees, the destitute and the lonely, and also organized intellectual and theological discussions there. Indeed, service to the poor and theology were equally important to her.

During the German occupation of Paris , she tried to save Jewish refugees who had been issued baptismal certificates from deportation to the concentration camps . In February 1943 she was arrested for this and first taken to the Royallieu concentration camp and later to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . On Holy Saturday , March 31, 1945, she was sent to the gas chamber after a selection .

Aftermath

Mother Mary is honored in Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations . On January 16, 2004, she was canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople .

The Soviet film "Мать Мария" ("Mother Maria") from 1982 with Lyudmila Kassatkina deals with her life.

Web links

Commons : Maria (Skobtsova)  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mother Mary - Her Work on Saving the Lives of Jews during the Holocaust , on the Yad Vashem website; www.yadvashem.org , PDF, viewed July 27, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Skobzowa, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mother mary; Pilenko, Jelisaveta Yuryevna; Pilenko, Elizaveta Yurievna; Kuzmina-Karawajewa, Elizaveta; Kuzmina-Karavayeva, Elizaveta; Skobzowa, Jelisaveta; Skobtsova, Elizaveta
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian poet, nun, escape helper in World War II, saint
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH March 31, 1945
Place of death Ravensbrück