Arrest 1943

In February 1943 the Gestapo broke up the community of the rue de Lourmel, arresting Mother Maria, her son Yuri (George) Skobtsov, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin, and the administrator Fedor Pianov; the essayist Ilya Fondaminsky, long associated with the circle, had been arrested earlier, in 1941. This file follows the arrests, the interrogations, and the roads to the camps.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

The Net Closes

By the winter of 1942–43 the rescue work at rue de Lourmel had drawn the attention of the German security police. The issuing of baptismal certificates to Jews, the sheltering of the hunted, and the general character of the house made it a target once the Gestapo turned its scrutiny on the Russian émigré charities (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9). In February 1943 the blow fell.

The sequence, as Hackel reconstructs it, was roughly this. The Gestapo first arrested Mother Maria’s son, Yuri (George) Skobtsov, who worked in the house; and, in connection with the same investigation, the chaplain Fr. Dimitri Klépinin and the administrator Fedor Pianov (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9). Mother Maria herself was arrested in the same days (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9). [Disputed: the exact dates and order of the February 1943 arrests are given with small variations across the accounts; Hackel’s biography establishes that Yuri, Klépinin, Pianov, and Mother Maria were all seized within a short span in February 1943, while the precise day-by-day sequence is reported without full documentary precision.]

Klépinin’s Refusal

The interrogations produced one of the story’s defining moments. Pressed by his interrogator — the name Hoffmann is given in the sources — to promise that he would cease helping Jews, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin refused, and, in the account that has come down, held up his pectoral cross and asked whether his interrogator knew “this Jew,” pointing to the crucified Christ (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). [Disputed: the vivid exchange in which Klépinin points to the crucifix and speaks of “this Jew” is recounted in the biographical tradition and is treated as substantially authentic by his biographers, but like much of the interrogation record it rests on later report rather than a contemporary transcript. Its substance — that Klépinin refused to disown his help to the Jews and thereby sealed his own fate — is firmly attested.] His refusal to save himself by betraying those he had helped is, for the Church that later glorified him, the very heart of his martyrdom (see The Four Glorified Together).

Ilya Fondaminsky, Arrested Earlier

The fourth of those later glorified together, the essayist and editor Ilya (Ilya Isidorovich) Fondaminsky (1880–1942), had been arrested earlier, in 1941, in the wave of arrests that followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and was interned at the camp at Compiègne before being deported (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8–9; see The Four Glorified Together). Fondaminsky, a Jew by birth and a leading figure of the émigré intelligentsia long close to Mother Maria’s circle, had drawn near to Christianity in these final years and, by tradition, received Orthodox baptism in the camp before his death (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9). [Disputed: the account of Fondaminsky’s baptism in internment is part of the pious tradition around him and is reported by his associates; the sources treat it sympathetically while acknowledging it rests on the testimony of those close to him rather than on documentary proof.] He was deported to Auschwitz, where he died in 1942 (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9).

The Roads to the Camps

After interrogation and internment near Paris — the transit camps of the region, including Compiègne and Romainville, figure in the accounts — the prisoners were deported eastward into the concentration-camp system of the Reich (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9). Their paths diverged:

  • Mother Maria was deported to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, where she would spend the last two years of her life and die (see Ravensbrück).
  • Yuri Skobtsov and Fr. Dimitri Klépinin were sent into the men’s camps — the accounts place them in the Buchenwald / Dora (Mittelbau) system — where both died early in 1944, of the disease and exhaustion of the camps (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9; see The Four Glorified Together). [Disputed: the exact camps, dates, and causes of the deaths of Yuri Skobtsov and Fr. Dimitri Klépinin in early 1944 are given with some variation in the sources (both are generally placed in the Buchenwald/Dora complex, dying within weeks of each other in the winter of 1943–44); Hackel establishes that both died in the camps in early 1944 while the particulars are imperfectly documented.]
  • Fedor Pianov, arrested with the others, survived the camps and was among the witnesses whose postwar testimony preserved much of what is known of the community’s last months (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9).

The Breaking of the Community

The arrests of February 1943 destroyed the rue de Lourmel community as a working body. Within roughly two years, three of the four who would be glorified together — Mother Maria, Yuri, and Klépinin — were dead in the camps, and Fondaminsky had already perished at Auschwitz. The house’s work of mercy and rescue was ended by the very persecution it had resisted. What remained was the witness: the refusal, under interrogation and unto death, to disown the persecuted neighbor — the theology of the sacrament of the brother carried to its last consequence (see Their Witness and The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister).

See Also

References

  • Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965; rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (Ch. 8–9 for the February 1943 arrests of Mother Maria, Yuri, Klépinin, and Pianov; Klépinin’s interrogation and refusal; Fondaminsky’s earlier arrest, baptism tradition, and death at Auschwitz; the deportations and the divergent fates, including Pianov’s survival.)
  • Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Forest’s introduction for the arrests and Klépinin’s stand.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the arrests and the fate of the community.)