This Nun Saved Hundreds from the Gestapo (St. Maria of Paris)

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Most people picture saints in quiet rooms with folded hands and downcast eyes.

[00:00:07]They don't see a cigarette smoking twice divorced poet who spent her nights in Parisian dive bars fishing the homeless out of gutters and arguing theology until [music] sunrise.

[00:00:21]They don't picture a woman who showed up to church in a filthy apron who scandalized proper religious society at every turn who once reportedly planned an assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky and who took her monastic vows specifically so she could live more in the world, not less.

[00:00:43]But in the summer of 1942 this unconventional nun walked into a sports stadium where the Nazis were holding over 12,000 Jewish men, women and children.

[00:00:56]And she didn't leave until she had smuggled out as many children as she could in garbage cans on the back of a sanitation truck.

[00:01:05]Her name was Elizaveta Pilenko.

[00:01:08]The world came to know her as Mother Maria.

[00:01:11]The Orthodox Church calls her as [music] Saint Maria of Paris.

[00:01:16]She spent her life being exactly the wrong kind of saint for everyone who wanted saints to be manageable.

[00:01:23]Too radical for the pious, too Orthodox for the radicals too Russian for the French too French for the Russians too holy for the sinners and too sinful for the holy.

[00:01:37]She was in other words exactly what Christ looked [music] like when he walked into the parts of the world decent people preferred to avoid. This is Saint Maria of Paris.

[00:01:49]And this is her story.

[00:01:51]She was born Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko on December 8th, 1891 in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire.

[00:02:01]Her family was aristocratic, educated, Orthodox.

[00:02:05]Her father was at various times the mayor of Anapa and director of a botanical garden at Yalta. Her mother's lineage stretched back to the last governor of the Bastille.

[00:02:17]She grew up near the Black Sea, surrounded by books, faith, and beauty.

[00:02:21]Then her father died when she was 14.

[00:02:24]She responded by doing what brilliant, grieving, intellectually restless young people often do. She abandoned God entirely. By the time she was 15, she was writing to the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg asking them to resolve her theological doubt. They referred her to a priest.

[00:02:42]She went to see him.

[00:02:44]He told her that doubt itself was a sign of faith worth preserving.

[00:02:49]She was unconvinced, but intrigued. She kept asking. In St. Petersburg, she fell into the literacy circles of the early 20th century, the Silver Age, the Symbolists, the poets. She published her first book of poems at 19. She married a Bolshevik intellectual named Kuzmin-Karavayev.

[00:03:12]She fell in love with the revolutionary atmosphere of the age, the conviction [music] that the world could be remade from the ground up.

[00:03:20]She even became a deputy mayor of Anapa during the chaos of the civil war.

[00:03:25]A 26-year-old woman running a town while armies fought around her.

[00:03:30]Then the White Army took Anapa.

[00:03:32]They arrested her, tried her for being a Bolshevik.

[00:03:36]The judge was a former teacher of hers named Daniel Skobtsov.

[00:03:41]He acquitted her.

[00:03:43]Before long, he married her.

[00:03:46]They fled Russia together through Georgia, through Yugoslavia, finally reaching Paris in 1923 with two children, a third born on the road.

[00:03:57]Paris, the city of exile for an entire generation of Russians who had lost everything. The Russian immigration in Paris was vast, traumatized, [music] poor, and adrift. And Elizaveta Skobtsova threw herself [music] into serving it.

[00:04:12]Then, her youngest daughter, Anastasia, died of meningitis in 1926.

[00:04:18]She was 4 years old.

[00:04:20]Something broke open in Elizaveta when her daughter died.

[00:04:25]She described it later as a second birth.

[00:04:28]She wrote, "My child's death showed me that I must give myself entirely to God's work."

[00:04:36]She began attending theological classes at the Saint Sergius Institute.

[00:04:40]She separated from Daniel amicably >> [music] >> with the blessing of the church.

[00:04:45]Their son, Yuri, went to live with his father. She deepened her work with the poor, the addicted, the mentally the refugees who had nobody. And in 1932, with the blessing of her bishop, Metropolitan Evlogy, she took monastic vows. Her bishop asked what name she would take. She chose Maria.

[00:05:06]He asked what kind of nun she intended to be.

[00:05:09]She told him she was going to live monasticism in the world, not behind the walls of a convent, but in the streets, the hospitals, the slums, where she was needed the most.

[00:05:22]The liturgy would not [music] end at the church door.

[00:05:25]It would continue wherever a human being, made in the image of God, needed to be seen.

[00:05:30]Her bishop understood. He blessed her.

[00:05:32]The more traditional members of her community were horrified. But Maria didn't [music] wait for their approval.

[00:05:38]She found a house at 77 Rue de Lourmel in the 15th arrondissement [music] of Paris and turned it into a house of hospitality. Anyone could come. She cooked, she cleaned, she begged and borrowed [music] and stayed up until dawn talking to people who had nowhere else to go.

[00:05:57]Refugees, the mentally ill, the alcoholics.

[00:06:01]She did embroidery, extraordinary embroidery.

[00:06:05]Icons [music] stitched in thread, vestments of real beauty, and sold them to fund the house. She was a genuine artist, a published poet, a trained theologian, and she spent [music] those gifts feeding soup to people who had nothing.

[00:06:20]The proper religious community watched with discomfort.

[00:06:24]She wore her habit while smoking.

[00:06:26]She served beer at the house sometimes.

[00:06:29]She had male guests.

[00:06:31]She argued theology loudly.

[00:06:33]She smelled of the kitchen more often than the incense.

[00:06:37]One bishop reportedly complained that she was an embarrassment to the church.

[00:06:41]She said something [music] about this that I want you to hear.

[00:06:44]The meaning of the liturgy must be translated into life.

[00:06:48]It is not enough to contemplate divine love and to sing its praises.

[00:06:53]One must do it.

[00:06:54]Do it.

[00:06:56]Go find the person who needs it.

[00:06:59]Bring them in. Feed them.

[00:07:01]Sit with them at midnight when they are in crisis.

[00:07:04]Let your habit get dirty.

[00:07:06]Let your reputation suffer.

[00:07:09]The liturgy continues on the street.

[00:07:11]This was her theology.

[00:07:13]She called it monasticism in the world, and she lived it with a ferocity that made comfortable religion look like what it often is, a beautiful building with nothing inside but its own reflection.

[00:07:27]She founded an organization called Orthodox Action.

[00:07:31]She opened more houses.

[00:07:32]She worked with Father Dmitri Klepinin, a young priest who became her closest collaborator, and with her son Yuri, who left his studies to help his mother as the Nazi threat darkened over Europe. When the Germans marched into France in June 1940, she could have left. Her bishop explicitly gave her the option.

[00:07:53]Many people were fleeing west toward England or across the Atlantic.

[00:07:59]But Maria Maria stayed.

[00:08:02]If the Germans take Paris, I shall stay here with my old women.

[00:08:07]Where else could I send them? And the Germans took [music] Paris and she kept her word.

[00:08:13]She stayed. In July 1942, the yellow star became mandatory for Jews in occupied Paris. Jewish people were barred from parks, cinemas, restaurants, most public places.

[00:08:26]They could shop for groceries only between 3:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon.

[00:08:30]The net was tightening. On July 16th and 17th, 1942, the French [music] police, not even the Germans, conducted the largest round up of Jews in the history of the occupation. It was called the Vel' d'Hiv round up.

[00:08:46]Named for the Vélodrome d'Hiver, the indoor cycling stadium where they concentrated the prisoners. 12,884 people were arrested. 6,900 of them, more than half were children.

[00:09:04]They were held in the stadium for 5 days in July heat. The captives received water only from a single fire hydrant while 10 latrines [music] were supposed to serve them all. There was almost no food.

[00:09:16]Children were separated from their parents.

[00:09:19]People were dying. From the stadium, they would be transferred to the transit camp at Drancy and from Drancy to Auschwitz. The stadium was 1 km away from the house of Mother Maria.

[00:09:32]Mother Maria heard what was happening and she went.

[00:09:36]Her monastic robe gained her [music] entrance.

[00:09:39]No one stopped the nun in a habit.

[00:09:43]She walked into the stadium and she spent three days there. Underneath her religious robes, she had placed food and necessities and she brought them to the detainees.

[00:09:53][music] She moved through the crowds.

[00:09:56]She comforted the dying.

[00:09:58]She held children. She listened to parents beg her for one [music] thing, "Save my child. Please. Just the child."

[00:10:06]She prayed and then she had an idea.

[00:10:11]By employing the confidence of the local sanitation workers in charge of hauling the garbage from the stadium, Mother Maria perpetrated a plot that would at least save the children from the gas chambers. Stuff them into the garbage bins, haul them out on the trucks from the stadium >> [music] >> and then under cover of night, sneak the children to the house on Rue de Lourmel where she could orchestrate their continued passage to the south of France.

[00:10:39]An area outside of Nazi control and to safety. Silent as a stone.

[00:10:45]That was the instruction.

[00:10:47]The children in the garbage cans had to be completely still, completely silent as the truck drove out of the stadium past the guards.

[00:10:56]One sound and it was over.

[00:10:59]No one is sure how many children Mother Maria and her garbage crew saved.

[00:11:04]The historical record is incomplete.

[00:11:07]Some sources say a handful, some say more.

[00:11:10]We don't know.

[00:11:12]What we know is that she was there for three days and she left with children that she had arrived without, hidden in the trash on a sanitation truck.

[00:11:22]And that those children did not go to Auschwitz.

[00:11:26]When people asked her afterward why she risked her life for Jews, people who were not even here flock, not even here faith.

[00:11:34]She had a simple answer. She pointed to the icon of the Theotokos.

[00:11:39]She pointed to the body of Christ on the cross.

[00:11:42]She saw every human face as an icon of Christ, everyone. The face of a terrified 4-year-old in a trash can was the face of Christ.

[00:11:52]How do you not act? Back at Rue de Lourmel, the network expanded.

[00:11:58]She and Father Klepinin created escape routes for Jews, providing them with fake documents, food, and any other help they could.

[00:12:06]They issued false baptismal certificates.

[00:12:09]They hid people. Yuri helped his mother.

[00:12:13]The house was as he put it herself, bursting at the seams.

[00:12:18]She also said, "It is amazing that the Germans haven't pounced on us yet." They were watching. They were waiting. And on February 8th, 1943, they pounced. The Gestapo arrested Yuri first after finding a letter that proved his involvement in the resistance.

[00:12:37]Father Klepinin was arrested the next day.

[00:12:40]Two days later on February 10th, they came for Mother Maria.

[00:12:44]She was taken to the prison at Compiègne. There she saw Yuri one last time.

[00:12:49]They said goodbye. He was taken to Buchenwald.

[00:12:53]Father Klepinin followed. Both died in the camps in early 1944.

[00:12:58]Yuri was 23 years [music] old. Mother Maria was sent to Ravensbrück, the women's concentration camp in northern Germany, 90 km north of Berlin. She was prisoner number 19,263.

[00:13:13]She had lived in poverty for years.

[00:13:15]She had trained her body to endure cold, hunger, discomfort.

[00:13:19]The poverty of the house on Rue de Lourmel, which had seemed extreme to her [music] comfortable critics, turned out to be preparation. She managed to survive for nearly 2 years, toughened by the poverty she had long endured. And she did in Ravensbruck exactly what she had done in Paris. She gathered the broken ones around her.

[00:13:41]She organized discussion groups on literature, [music] theology, history.

[00:13:46]She prayed with people.

[00:13:48]She comforted the dying.

[00:13:50]She often gave away portions of her tiny food rations so that others could cling to life.

[00:13:56]A survivor named Jacqueline Perry Dallen Court described what Mother Maria's discussion circles felt like in that place.

[00:14:05]She used to organize real discussion circles. And I had the good fortune to participate in them.

[00:14:11]Here was an oasis at the end of the day.

[00:14:14]An oasis in Ravensbruck concentration camp.

[00:14:20]A prisoner who survived wrote, She exercised an enormous influence on [music] us all.

[00:14:25]No matter what our nationality, age, political convictions, this had no significance whatever.

[00:14:33]Mother Maria was adored by all.

[00:14:35]The younger prisoners gained particularly from her concern.

[00:14:40]She took us under her wing.

[00:14:42]We were cut off from our families and somehow she provided us with [music] a family.

[00:14:47]This is the woman who has scandalized proper religious society by living too much in the world.

[00:14:55]In the worst [music] place in the world, she was still the mother.

[00:15:00]She was still the open door.

[00:15:02]By early 1945, she was weakening.

[00:15:05]The years of hard labor, the inadequate food she had been sharing with everyone else, the illness spreading through the camp, all of it was taking its toll. On some occasions, guards [music] would enter the barracks at night to make further selections. Mother Maria's friends frequently [music] hid her in a space above the ceiling so that she could not be selected. She survived into March.

[00:15:27]Germany was collapsing, the Russian army advancing from the east, the allies from the west. The end of the war was weeks away.

[00:15:34]It didn't come in time. On March 30, 1945, Good Friday, the camp guards were conducting their selections.

[00:15:44]Groups of prisoners were being separated for the gas chambers.

[00:15:47]>> [music] >> A woman was chosen. She was 35. Mother Maria, even though she was not selected, asked to stand in the place of another woman prisoner. She stepped forward. The guard accepted the exchange. The following day, Holy Saturday, March 31, 1945, she was led to the gas chamber. The liberation of the camp came weeks later.

[00:16:08]She was 53 years old.

[00:16:11]The war in Europe ended 39 days after her death. A woman who began her life as an atheist, who lost her daughter, her country, who lost everything the world calls security, who spent her life in the worst parts of every city she lived in, this woman, on Good Friday, stepped forward and took the place of a terrified stranger in the line for the gas chamber.

[00:16:36]>> [music] >> This is what theology looks like when it becomes a body. Theology is a life that walks up to the death that was meant for someone else and stays and says, "Take me instead."

[00:16:48]She had written about this years before in a theological essay called The Mysticism of Human Communion. She wrote that every person carries within them the image of God, the divine imprint.

[00:17:00]And to see another human face is to see that image.

[00:17:03]And that the proper response to seeing God in another person is to love them.

[00:17:08]Not to contemplate loving them.

[00:17:10]To actually love them.

[00:17:12]To act.

[00:17:14]She acted for 53 years.

[00:17:17]She acted in the Parisian slums, in the stadium, in the camp, in the line for the gas chamber.

[00:17:23]The Orthodox Church canonized her on January 16, 2004, alongside Father Dmitri Klepinin, her son Yuri, and her friend and collaborator Ilya Fondaminsky. All four died in the camps. All four are saints of the Orthodox Church. Her feast day is July 20. At the Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky in Paris, the city where she fed food to the poor, hid refugees, and argued theology until dawn, they unveiled her icon.

[00:17:55]Cigarette burns on her habit, boots that smelled like the gutter, a large heart, and a loud voice, and no patience whatsoever for religion that stayed safely behind its own walls.

[00:18:07]This is against the current. The current is the comfortable path, the theology that stays clean, the faith that doesn't cost anything, the cross that's worn as jewelry but never carried.

[00:18:18]The current asks you to admire saints from a safe distance.

[00:18:23]Mother Maria of Paris spent her entire life refusing that distance. She wrote, "At the last judgment, I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercise, [music] nor how many bows and prostrations I made.

[00:18:38]Instead, I shall be asked, did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, [music] visit the sick and the imprisoned?

[00:18:46]That is all I shall be asked.

[00:18:48]That is all."

[00:18:50]Saint Maria of Paris, pray for us.

[00:18:54]Christos Anesti.