Maria of Paris was a Russian poet and émigrée who became a nun in Paris and devoted her monastic life to sheltering the poor, the homeless, and the destitute. Born Elizaveta Pilenko in Riga in 1891, she passed through a turbulent early life of literary and revolutionary activity in Russia before emigrating and embracing a monasticism lived not in the cloister but in the streets and tenements of the city. During the German occupation of France she and her co-workers sheltered Jews and provided them with baptismal certificates and means of escape, work for which she was arrested and deported. She died in the gas chamber at the Ravensbrück concentration camp on Holy Saturday, 31 March 1945, and is commemorated on July 20.
Her life before her tonsure was marked by upheaval. As a young woman she moved in the socialist and intellectual circles of St. Petersburg, became a published poet, and, by tradition, was among the first women to study at a theological academy in the Russian capital. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution she held municipal office in the southern town of Anapa before fleeing Russia and arriving in Paris in 1923. She had been married twice and bore three children; the death of her young daughter Anastasia in 1926 is generally recounted as a turning point that deepened her resolve to give herself wholly to the service of others.
In 1932 she was tonsured a nun with the name Maria, taking her vows with the explicit understanding that she would continue to live in the world rather than withdraw to a monastery. She established a house in Paris that became a refuge with an open door for the needy, the lonely, and refugees of the Russian emigration. Alongside her labored a circle of co-workers, among them the priest Demetrius Klepinin, who served the house as its chaplain. When the war came, this ministry of hospitality became a ministry of rescue.
