Vera Truks

Holy Martyr Vera Truks was the cell attendant of Archbishop Thaddeus of Tver and died in the Siberian camps in 1942, a few months before the end of her sentence.

She was born on 14 February 1886 in the village of Tamarovka in the Chernigov district, in a family whose father was a Czech working as a forester for a landowner. After two classes of town school she passed the examination for the right to be a teacher and taught in village schools between 1909 and 1923. In 1909 she took a training course at Vladimir-⁠Volynsky, where Bishop Thaddeus Uspensky lectured on pedagogy, and she came to know him. Later, when she fell gravely ill, he arranged for her to be sent for treatment in the Crimea. After the bishop's arrest in 1921 she joined other faithful in pleading for his release, carried parcels to him in prison and sent food to the Zyrian land, where he was in exile. She then helped him at Astrakhan and at Tver. In 1923 she went to Patriarch Tikhon and asked his blessing to be Archbishop Thaddeus's cell attendant, and the Patriarch told her: "You will bear many sorrows."

She was arrested on 23 December 1937, two days after the arrest of Saint Thaddeus. At the interrogations she was asked about the archbishop's hostile activity and answered that in all that time she had noticed in him no sign of hostility toward Soviet power. She did not admit the charge of counter-⁠revolutionary activity. On 14 September 1938 a special council of the regional NKVD sentenced her to five years in a camp. She served the term in the camps of Siberia and died in 1942.

She was glorified at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in the year 2000. She is commemorated on 31 December and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.