05 — The Occupation and the Rescue

Under the German occupation of Paris, the open house of the rue de Lourmel became a station of rescue. This section covers the sheltering of Jews and others — Fr. Dimitri Klépinin’s baptismal certificates, the hiding and smuggling of refugees during the roundups — and the Gestapo arrests of February 1943 that ended the work and led to the camps.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

When France fell in 1940 and the persecution of the Jews began under the occupation, Mother Maria and her chaplain Fr. Dimitri Klépinin turned the apparatus of mercy they had built for the destitute émigrés into an apparatus of rescue for the hunted. It cost them their lives. This section presents the rescue work soberly, on the evidence of the standard biography and the postwar record, and then the arrests that broke up the community in February 1943.

Section Contents

  • Sheltering Jews Under the Nazis — rue de Lourmel as a refuge; Fr. Dimitri Klépinin’s baptismal certificates; the roundups, including the Vél d’Hiv of July 1942; the network of hiding and escape
  • Arrest 1943 — the Gestapo arrests of February 1943: Yuri Skobtsov, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin, Fedor Pianov, and Mother Maria; the earlier arrest and death of Ilya Fondaminsky

See Also