biography
pronunciation:
[skobtsohva]
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1891–1945)
|
| biography:
| Russian Orthodox nun, born in Riga, Latvia. She was the first woman to enrol at the Ecclesiastical Academy at St Petersburg. She later escaped Bolshevik excesses by going to France, where she began work with the Russian Orthodox Student Christian Movement, and in 1932, despite having had two divorces, became a nun. Unconventional and radical, she worked among society's cast-offs, whom she fed and housed. Arrested by the Nazis in wartime Paris, she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp (1943), where she brought Christian light and hope despite appalling conditions. She was gassed in 1945, reportedly going voluntarily ‘in order to help her companions to die’. |
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