The Death of 31 March 1945

Mother Maria died at Ravensbrück on 31 March 1945 — Holy Saturday by the Western reckoning that year, and only weeks before the camp was liberated. A cherished tradition holds that she went to her death in the gas chamber in the place of another woman; her biographer treats this as uncertain and undocumented. This file presents the death with the restraint the sources demand: the fact of her death at the very edge of liberation is firm; the manner of it is not.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

The Date

Mother Maria died at Ravensbrück on 31 March 1945 (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 10; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). The date is heavy with significance for those who venerate her: in 1945, 31 March fell on the eve of Western Easter (Holy Saturday), and the coincidence of her death with the threshold of Pascha — the feast of the Resurrection — has been read by the tradition as fitting for a martyr of self-emptying love (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 10). [Disputed: the exact date of Mother Maria’s death is generally given as 31 March 1945 and this is the date received in her glorification and veneration; a small number of accounts give a slightly different day in the last days of March 1945. Hackel treats 31 March 1945 as the best-attested date while noting the difficulty of precise documentation in the camp’s final chaos.] The camp was liberated at the end of April 1945 — Ravensbrück was reached by the Red Army on 30 April — so that she died only weeks, perhaps days by the reckoning of the camp’s dissolution, before deliverance (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 10; standard histories of Ravensbrück).

The Manner of Her Death

That Mother Maria died in the gas chamber at Ravensbrück in the final murderous phase of the camp is the account that has come down, and it is consistent with the camp’s known history: in early 1945 Ravensbrück operated a gas chamber and killed large numbers of prisoners in the weeks before liberation (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 10; standard histories). Beyond this, the precise circumstances are not documented, and the honest course is to say so.

The Substitution Tradition

The most famous and beloved element of the story is the tradition that Mother Maria took the place of another woman selected for the gas chamber — that, in the final selection, she stepped forward or exchanged her number so that another (in some tellings a young woman, or a fellow prisoner with more reason to live) might be spared, and went to her death in her stead (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 10; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). This account, which figures her death as a deliberate laying-down of her life after the pattern of Christ — “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13) — is deeply cherished and is very widely repeated in the devotional literature.

It must, however, be flagged carefully, and this collection does so:

[Disputed: the tradition that Mother Maria took the place of another woman in the gas chamber at Ravensbrück is a pious tradition, not a documented fact, and reputable biographers regard it as uncertain. Sergei Hackel, her principal scholarly biographer, examines the accounts of her death and treats the substitution story with caution: it derives from later survivor testimony, the reports are not fully consistent, and no contemporary documentation confirms it (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 10). Some survivor accounts support a form of the story; others describe her death without it. The collection reports the tradition as what it is — a cherished and possibly true account of a self-sacrificial death, congruent with everything known of her life, but resting on memory rather than record — and does not assert it as established history. Neither does it deny it: the point is that it cannot be confirmed, and integrity requires that it not be presented as documented.]

The reason for this care is not any wish to diminish her. It is precisely the reverse: a martyr of her stature deserves the truth, and the truth here includes the limits of what can be known. Her death at Ravensbrück on the eve of liberation, after two years of endurance and a life laid down for the persecuted, is martyrdom enough; it does not require the embellishment of a particular scene that the evidence cannot bear. And if the substitution did occur — as it well may have, and as those who knew her found wholly in character — it was the last act of the same love she had preached and lived, needing no proof beyond the shape of the whole life (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 10; see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister).

No Grave

Like the great majority of those murdered in the camps, Mother Maria has no known grave; her body was destroyed in the camp’s crematoria, and there is no relic in the ordinary sense (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 10). Her memorial is her writing, the testimony of those she helped and those who survived with her, and the veneration of the Church that glorified her in 2004 (see Glorification 2004). The absence of a grave places her, in this respect, with the New Martyrs of the twentieth century generally, whose relics the persecutors took pains to obliterate (cf. St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, whose remains, unusually, were recovered).

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. 10 for the death on 31 March 1945, the gas chamber, the cautious treatment of the substitution tradition, the survivor testimony, and the absence of a grave.)
  • 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 death and its traditions.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on her death and its meaning.)
  • Scripture: John 15:13 (the measure of the love the substitution tradition ascribes to her).