Sheltering Jews Under the Nazis

Under the German occupation of Paris, the rue de Lourmel became a refuge for Jews and others fleeing arrest and deportation. Mother Maria fed and hid refugees; her chaplain Fr. Dimitri Klépinin issued baptismal certificates that could shield the hunted; and during the great roundups of 1942 the community worked to save whom it could — most famously, by tradition, children caught in the Vél d’Hiv. This file presents the rescue work on the evidence, distinguishing what is documented from what is remembered.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

Paris Under Occupation

Germany defeated France in June 1940 and occupied Paris. Almost at once the machinery of anti-Jewish persecution began — registration, the yellow star, the exclusion from professions, and finally arrest and deportation to the death camps of the East (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8; standard histories of the occupation). For Mother Maria the choice this posed was not, given everything she had taught and built, really a choice at all. The house whose principle was that the stranger is Christ could not close its doors to the most hunted strangers of all. “If the Germans come looking for Jews,” she is reported to have said, the house would receive them; and it did (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003).

The Refuge at Rue de Lourmel

From the early days of the occupation, 77 rue de Lourmel became a place of refuge. Jews and others in danger were taken in, fed, hidden, and helped toward escape from Paris and, where possible, out of occupied France (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). The house’s existing character as a chaotic, open, come-and-go establishment for the destitute was itself a kind of cover: among the many who passed through, the hunted could be less conspicuous. The work was dangerous in the extreme — sheltering Jews was a capital matter under the occupation — and it was undertaken with open eyes.

Fr. Dimitri Klépinin and the Baptismal Certificates

The house’s chaplain from 1939, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin (1904–1944), became a central figure in the rescue. He issued baptismal certificates to Jews who sought them — documents attesting an Orthodox baptism that might, in some circumstances, shield the bearer from the worst of the racial laws (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8–9; see The Four Glorified Together). The parish register at rue de Lourmel swelled with such names. Klépinin did this in full knowledge of the risk, and when he was later interrogated he refused to disown the Jews he had helped — a refusal that cost him his life (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9; see Arrest 1943). [Disputed: the number of baptismal certificates Klépinin issued is given variously in the literature (figures in the dozens are commonly cited); the fact of the practice and its lethal consequence are firmly attested, while any precise total is not securely documented.]

The moral texture of this act deserves care. The certificates were, in one sense, documents of convenience — not records of conversion but instruments of rescue. Klépinin and Mother Maria seem to have understood them frankly as such, a use of the Church’s own forms to hide the persecuted, in the tradition of the “lie of necessity” told to save a life (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8–9). That an Orthodox priest and nun bent the paperwork of the Church to shelter Jews from murder is, for their defenders, among the most Christ-like things about them; the record does not suggest they saw it otherwise.

The Roundups and the Vél d’Hiv

The persecution reached a terrible climax in the mass arrests of the summer of 1942. On 16–17 July 1942 the French police, at German direction, carried out the great roundup known as the Rafle du Vél d’Hiv, arresting some thirteen thousand Jews — men, women, and thousands of children — and holding many of them in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor cycling arena, before deportation (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8; standard histories of the Vél d’Hiv roundup). A persistent and cherished tradition holds that Mother Maria, moving with her habit and her fearlessness, gained entry to the Vélodrome during those days and worked to comfort the imprisoned and to smuggle out children, in some accounts hidden in refuse bins carried out by sanitation workers (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). [Disputed: the account of Mother Maria entering the Vél d’Hiv and rescuing children in garbage bins is widely repeated in the devotional and popular literature and is treated sympathetically by her biographers; Hackel handles it with characteristic caution, and the precise details (how she gained entry, how many children, the exact means) rest largely on later testimony rather than contemporary documentation. The substance — that she and her circle worked strenuously to help Jews during the 1942 roundups — is well attested; the vivid particulars are a matter of tradition and should not be asserted as documented fact.]

The Network and Its Limits

The rescue at rue de Lourmel was one node in a wider, improvised network of French men and women — clergy, laity, resistance workers — who hid and moved the hunted. Mother Maria’s circle fed refugees, arranged hiding places in the city and countryside, forged or obtained papers, and helped people toward the unoccupied zone and beyond (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). How many were saved cannot be counted with precision; the work was necessarily secret, and much of the evidence is postwar testimony. What is certain is that the effort was real, sustained, and lethal to those who made it — and that it flowed directly and without any change of principle from the theology of the neighbor as Christ that Mother Maria had preached for a decade (see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister).

Recognition

After the war, the state of Israel’s Yad Vashem recognized both Mother Maria Skobtsova and Fr. Dimitri Klépinin as Righteous Among the Nations — the honor accorded to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust — a recognition based on the testimony of those they helped (Yad Vashem, Righteous Among the Nations records; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, and later accounts). [Disputed: the exact dates of the Yad Vashem recognitions are given somewhat variously in the literature (mid-1980s), but the fact of the recognition of both Mother Maria and Fr. Dimitri Klépinin as Righteous Among the Nations is firmly established.] This recognition, from outside the Church and on the hard evidence of survivors, is one of the firmest external attestations of the rescue work, and it weighs heavily in the case for her sanctity (see The Contested Saint — Methodology).

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 occupation, rue de Lourmel as refuge, Klépinin’s baptismal certificates, the 1942 roundups and the Vél d’Hiv tradition, the network, and the caution proper to the later testimony.)
  • 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 rescue work and its context.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the rescue work under the occupation.)
  • Yad Vashem, The Righteous Among the Nations Database (records for Maria Skobtsova and Dimitri Klépinin). (The postwar recognition on survivor testimony.)