Jacqueline Pery d’Alincourt

This article takes the form of a personal testimony about Mother Maria Skobtsova, a Russian Orthodox nun deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The author, Jacqueline Pery d'Alincourt, a former prisoner of the same camp, recounts two striking memories: the spiritual teachings that Mother Maria secretly imparted to the detainees in 1944, notably the transmission of the "prayer of the heart" and Russian spirituality, and then the nun's agony in the final weeks of the camp in 1945. This account, first published in New York in 1946, constitutes a first-hand historical source on the life and death of Mother Maria, canonized by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2004. It documents her role as a spiritual guide in an extreme context and sheds light on the martyrological dimension of her journey, confirmed by a premonitory poem written in her own hand.