Dimitri Klepinin

Saint Dimitri Klepinin (1904-1944), hieromartyr, was a priest of the Russian parish in Paris, a collaborator of Mother Maria Skobtsova in the work of helping the poor and, during the German occupation, a rescuer of Jews. He died on 9 February 1944 in the Dora camp, belonging to Buchenwald. The Ecumenical Patriarchate canonized him in 2004. He is commemorated on 20 July.

Youth

He was born on 14 April 1904 at Pyatigorsk, in the family of the architect Andrei Nikolaevich Klepinin and Sofia Alexandrovna, born Stepanova. In 1920 the family emigrated to Constantinople, in 1922 moved to Belgrade, and in 1925 he arrived in France and entered the Saint Sergius Theological Institute in Paris. There he was a spiritual son of Archpriest Sergius Chetverikov and a member of the circle of Orthodox students. He graduated in 1929, went to America on a scholarship to a theological seminary in New York, in 1930 worked in Yugoslavia in the copper mines of Bor, and returned to France in 1931. Between 1931 and 1937 he was psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Entrance into the Temple. He took part in the Russian Student Christian Movement and was among the founders, in 1935, of the charitable organization Orthodox Action and of the hostel for poor Russian emigrants on rue de Lourmel in Paris.

In 1937 he married Tamara Baimakova and in the same year was ordained deacon and priest, assistant to the rector of the church of the Entrance into the Temple. In 1938 he was rector of the Holy Trinity church at Ozoir-⁠la-⁠Ferrière near Paris, and from 1939 of the house church of the Protection of the Mother of God at the hostel on rue de Lourmel.

Rescuing Jews

During the occupation of Paris he took part in the Resistance and in the committee for help to prisoners of the Royallieu camp in Compiègne. In July 1942, when the mass arrests of Jews began, Mother Maria and Father Dimitri began rescuing them. He baptized those who asked for baptism and gave false certificates to those who did not wish to receive the sacrament. He issued hundreds of false certificates of baptism and of membership in the Protection parish. Many Jews escaped arrest, and some managed to leave the occupied zone and go to other countries.

On 8 February 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo, with other colleagues of Orthodox Action, and imprisoned at Royallieu in Compiègne, then in the underground camp Dora. Archpriest Sergei Hackel recounted that he was interrogated for four hours and did not justify himself. A Gestapo officer offered him freedom on condition that he stop helping Jews. He showed the officer his pectoral cross with the Crucifixion and asked whether he knew this Jew. He was struck in the face. The officer said that the priest had ruined himself, because he stated that if released he would do just as before.

In his last letter from the camp he wrote that he had been sent unexpectedly to Germany, that he had full awareness of God's will being done and of the beginning of a new church obedience, and that Christ was with them, and all around was trivial beside His love. At Dora he refused the badge that showed he was from France, to share the lot of the Russians from Soviet Russia, treated even worse. He shared his parcels with hungry prisoners and was losing strength. The prisoners asked that he, who looked like a sick old man, be put to light work, but when asked his age he said thirty-⁠nine. He died of illness and exhaustion on 9 February 1944, according to a witness of pneumonia, on the dirty floor of the so-⁠called infirmary, without medicine. His body was probably taken to the crematorium at Buchenwald.

Veneration

The State of Israel gave him the title Righteous Among the Nations, and his name is inscribed at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. On 16 January 2004 he was canonized by the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, at the same time as the nun Maria (Skobtsova), George Skobtsov and Ilya Fondaminsky. The glorification took place on 1-2 May 2004 in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris, with the participation of Christians of several confessions. The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger, said the Catholic Church too would honour them as saints and patrons of France. One Greek source says that the Russian Church canonized them, which is an error.