Yom
HaShoah, the annual commemoration of the millions of lives lost in the
Holocaust, began at sundown yesterday. At 1000 local time, everything will come
to a halt across Israel, and people will stand silent and still, remembering
those deaths. It’s an astonishing thing to watch on my computer screen; I
cannot imagine it in real life.
(Possibly the two minutes of silence
at 1100 on 11 November every year in the UK is the closest approximation. But in
the years I lived there, I never saw the kind of universal participation—traffic
kept moving, people chattered—so, no.)
Today’s poem for National Poetry
Month is by Maria Skobtsova, née Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko in 1891 in Riga,
then part of Russia. She embraced atheism in her youth, married for the first
time at age 20 (to a Bolshevik), and got involved with pre-war literary circles.
For a while—during and after the Russian Revolution, Skobtsova had quite the
adventurous life, including a planned assassination of Leon Trotsky, from which
she was dissuaded by friends. Following her divorce, she was drawn to the
(Orthodox) Church; she married a second time (to a man named Skobtsov), divorced
this husband and moved to Paris with her children. The short version of this
journey is that she took religious vows (assuming the name Maria) and found her
calling in social work and theological studies. Her home became a center for
refugees, geographic, economic and spiritual; her doors were open to anyone in
need of help.
I don’t know whether it was a
residue of her early years as an atheist, but somewhat unusually for a follower
of Eastern Orthodoxy (the term “pogrom” and its practice originated in tsarist
Russia), Skobtsova welcomed Jews to her refuge (without expectation of needing
conversion), including during the time following the German invasion and
occupation of France. Her spiritual advisor, Father Dmitri Klepenin, issued
baptismal certificates to Jews, and she both sheltered those who came to her
and helped many escape the country.
Eventually the Nazis came for her. In
1943 she was sent to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women, where she
was gassed on 31 March 1945, five weeks before the end of the war. In 2004, the
Eastern Church declared Skobtsova a saint; in 1985, she was recognized as
Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Skobtsova’s poetry covered a lot of
ground, but for today I’ll give you this one.
“Israel”
Two triangles, a star,
The shield of King David, our
forefather.
This is election, not offense.
The great path and not an evil.
Once more in a term fulfilled,
Once more roars the trumpet of the
end;
And the fate of a great people
Once more is by the prophet
proclaimed.
Thou art persecuted again, O Israel,
But what can human malice mean to
thee,
who have heard the thunder from
Sinai?
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