St. Maria of Paris

Elizabeth Pilenko, a poet of the Petersburg literary world and a revolutionary, deputy mayor of Anapa in 1918, who emigrated to Paris, buried a daughter, and was tonsured a nun in 1932 on the condition that she would not be sent to a convent. She rented a house in the rue de Lourmel and filled it with the destitute: a hostel, a canteen, a chapel she decorated herself. Under the German occupation she and Fr Dimitri Klepinin issued baptismal certificates to Jews and hid people in the house. She was arrested in 1943 and died at Ravensbruck on 31 March 1945, sent to the gas chamber - by a tradition that came from the camp, in place of another woman. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2004 with her son and Fr Dimitri. Feast: July 20.