Mother Maria Skobtsova died in the gas chamber of Ravensbruck concentration camp on the eve of Easter, March 31,1945, days before the liberation. She was arrested by the Gestapo for sheltering Jews in Paris. It was the culmination of a remarkable journey that began in Russia.
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Divorced twice, a poet, political activist, she fled Russia in 1923 with her two children and settled in Paris. After her daughter's death she underwent a deep conversion. Determined to live "a more authentic and purified life" she turned to social work among Russian refugees.
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Encouraged to become an Orthodox nun, she wished to develop a new type of monasticism, engaged in the world, marked by "the complete absence of even the subtlest barrier which might separate the heart from the world and its wounds." In her home she operated a soup kitchen.
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In becoming a nun she said, "I think service to the world is simply the giving of one's own sol in order to save others." During the Nazi occupation she helped rescue Jews and other political refugees, until her arrest by the Gestapo in 1943. Her writings
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Mother Maria Skobtsova has been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. "I am your message, Lord. Throw me like a blazing torch into the night, that all may see and understand what it means to be a disciple.
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