Sofka Skipwith
Righteous Among the Nations |
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By country |
Sofka Skipwith (born Sophia Dolgorukova; 23 October 1907[1] – 26 February 1994[2]) was a Russian princess, who after working for Laurence Olivier and being interned by the Nazis in France in World War II, worked to save Jews from the Holocaust. She was honoured for her efforts by both the British government and by Israel, where she has been named one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Life
Childhood
Skipwith was the only child of Prince Peter Dolgorouky and
On her father's side, Skipwith was descended from Rurik, Prince of Novgorod, but also from a Greek slave-girl whom a Polish count won from an Austrian prince in a card game.[3] Skipwith's paternal grandfather, "Sandik," was Grand Marshal of the Imperial Court and Master of Ceremonies; Skipwith remembered him as ""a rather terrifying figure.'"[1]
On her mother's side she was descended from
In 1916,
When the Revolution occurred, Skipwith's grandmother took her with her to the Crimea, where she was in attendance as lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress Marie, and in the spring of 1919 they were evacuated in a large party of aristocrats with the Empress to England.[14][15] Skipwith was raised in Bath, London, Rome, Budapest (where her stepfather was representing the still recognised Russian Imperial government and where her mother decided she should be "out"[16]), Nice, Paris and finally Dieppe.
During her time in London she "thoroughly enjoyed" going to school at Queen's College,[17] where she earned a School Certificate, and met the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton. She became close friends with their daughter Margaret Douglas-Hamilton, who was almost exactly the same age, visited them numerous times, and after Margaret was expelled from school, was invited back from Rome to stay for six months and study with a governess with her; the two finally drove the governess to "throwing everything moveable" at them.[18]
In Nice, she studied at the
Secretarial work
On her mother's suggestion, Skipwith qualified as a French and English shorthand-typist at the Ecole Pigier in Dieppe
In 1931 she married Leo Zinovieff, also a Russian aristocrat whose family had fled the Revolution. He was an engineer, having learned English in a cram school at 15 and then taken first place at the City and Guilds Engineering College.[25] For eighteen months she worked only intermittently, translated her mother's book, and went to and gave parties.[26] Then as the Great Depression deepened, her husband was let go, and she was unable to work as a secretary because of continuing morning sickness with her first pregnancy. They managed on rent from most of their house, typing, proofreading and envelope-stuffing work, and loans and gifts of "grouse and partridge" from friends.[27] After the birth of her son Peter, Skipwith signed up with the Universal Aunts temps agency and also taught Russian at Davies', an agency which provided coaching for the Foreign Service examinations. Through Universal Aunts, she began working for Laurence Olivier and his wife Jill Esmond and soon was working there five days a week.[28]
Second marriage and wartime internment
She and Zinovieff separated amicably and after her second son was born, divorced following the instructions in
Skipwith's husband joined the military, first a patrol boat and then the
During her time in internment, Skipwith repeatedly tried to help people escape,
Skipwith was repatriated to England in August 1944, after having refused earlier opportunities to continue trying to help the Poles.[52] During the long, circuitous train journey to neutral Lisbon, she and her friend were given special treatment by the Gestapo, who had misinterpreted instructions from the camp Kommandant to pay special attention to them; they were recruited to go to Berlin to make propaganda broadcasts and played along to get the address of the contact.[53]
Olivier immediately had her hired as secretary of the
Post-war
In 1946 Skipwith left the Old Vic to pay more attention to her young son, resumed working for Universal Aunts, and devoted much of her time to the Communist Party. She started a pot-luck party after the pubs closed called 'Sofka's Saturday Soups', covertly using
In 1948, at forty, armed with a letter of recommendation from Olivier that began: "I have known Sofka Skipwith, man and boy, for fifteen years. She has been private secretary, company secretary, play-reader and present help in time of trouble", she returned to Paris.
On one of her tours to the USSR, she met a trades unionist, marathon runner and track and field coach from Shepherd's Bush; after she moved back to London late in 1957, they moved together into a house her youngest son bought for them when he came of age and received an inheritance.[62] In 1962 they used his savings to buy "a primitive stone cottage in the middle of Bodmin Moor".[63][64] They renovated it, Skipwith wrote her memoirs and worked on a second volume,[2] and she stopped working for Progressive Tours in 1964.[65] They both preferred seclusion in their retirement – visitors were ordered to spend the day outside and given a departure time.[66] Skipwith died of heart failure in February 1994, shortly after having appeared on a Timewatch documentary about Rasputin;[67][2] her partner died ten years later. According to her granddaughter, Skipwith "always felt herself to be firstly a Russian, claiming jokily that 'All Russians are crazy!'"[1] She died in 1994 in Cornwall.
Political and social convictions
Skipwith described herself as having been concerned with economic inequality since childhood. In St. Petersburg she heard from one of her grandmother's servants that people were starving, and smuggled cakes to him to give to the poor, and in the Crimea she made friends and discussed raids on nearby estates with the lodge-keeper's grandsons; their father and the servant were both members of the local Soviet.[68] In Rome her "instinctive socialism" was fired by reading political literature.[69] Shortly after she started working for the Duchess of Hamilton, she assisted in her son Douglas's campaign as Unionist candidate for the impoverished constituency of Govan, in Glasgow, but was shocked by the conditions in which the people lived and more impressed by the incumbent Labour MP.[70][71] The experience of poverty after her first husband lost his job convinced her of "the injustice of the social set-up, the obviously false division of mankind into class society", whereas he "merely [felt it was] bad luck that we happened to be on the wrong side".[72] In 1933, after the birth of her first son, the couple both felt the nursing home should be investigated for mistreatment of babies and failure to pay staff, so she worked there as a bookkeeper until she had enough information to report the proprietor, who was sent to prison; the one nurse with nowhere to go, Skipwith employed as a nanny.[73]
She and her second husband tried to read Marx and Lenin but found them too difficult;
She was an unembarrassed advocate of
Honours
In 1985, she received a letter from
Children
- Peter Zinovieff, 1933–2021
- Ian [Zinovieff] Fitzlyon, b. 1935
- Sir Patrick Skipwith, 12th Baronet Skipwith, 1938–2016
References
- ^ ISBN 978-1-60598-009-6.
- ^ a b c Frida Knight, "Obituary: Sofka Skipwith", The Independent 8 March 1994.
- OCLC 504549593, pp. 12–13.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 13–14.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 25.
- ^ a b Zinovieff, p. 44.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 66–67.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 32.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 65.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 99–100, 107–17.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 150.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 35; however, Skipwith's memoir has "née Princess Sophy Dolgorouky" on the title-page, and MI5's file on her is labelled "Skipwith, Mrs, Sophie" – Zinovieff, p. 281.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 18.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 90–95
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 35, 48–49, 54–56.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 75.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 58.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 68–70; the obituary in The Independent interprets this as completing her education in Scotland.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 80–81, 96–97.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 71–73.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 101–02.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 161, 164–65.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 113–14.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 116.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 175.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 124.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 125–27.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 131–33.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 140, 143–44.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 154.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 200.
- ^ a b Skipwith, p. 158.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 201–02.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 161–62, 164–66.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 169.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 171, 188–89, 191.
- ^ Zinovieff's The Daily Telegraph summary incorrectly says two days.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 199.
- ^ Zinovieff refers to it in The Daily Telegraph article as "what [the Germans] considered a model camp".
- ^ Skipwith, p. 279.
- ^ His death was reported in June as having occurred in May: "Personal Items", Leamington Spa Courier, 26 June 1942, via British Newspaper Archive. Zinovieff, p. 246 says that his was one of 41 planes downed during the first 'thousand-bomber raid' on Cologne on 30–31 May 1942; The Independent states that he was killed in a raid on Berlin.
- ^ For example two women who successfully reached London, Skipwith pp. 205–06, and another two in March 1943 with false papers courtesy of the French Resistance, p. 217.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 222-23.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 225.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 337–38.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 232.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 234–35.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 258; here and in her The Daily Telegraph article, the baby is male; Skipwith's account is that it was a girl. "She eventually reached Israel, where she was brought up in a Kibbutz, and is now married with children of her own".
- ^ Skipwith, p. 231.
- ^ Zinovieff pp. 336–37.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 238.
- ^ Skipwith pp. 229, 238, 247.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 240–46.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 250.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 260–66
- ^ Skipwith, p. 278.
- ISBN 0-7153-6187-2.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 282.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 288–90.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 302.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 295, 297–301.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 306–07, 318.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 322.
- ^ The Independent obituary adds the detail that when post from Albania arrived at the village, the postmaster became convinced the two were the exiled King and Queen Zog.
- ^ a b Zinovieff, p. 326.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 329–30.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 341.
- ^ Skipwith pp. 34, 39, 43, 45.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 72.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 166–67.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 109–10.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 127–28.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 128–29.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 163–4.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 202, 207.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 253.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 258, 271: She joined the Committee of the Chelsea branch and became Branch Secretary.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 269.
- ^ Sofka Skipwith, A Short Guide to the People's Republic of Albania, Ilford: Albanian Society, 1968, OCLC 503774979.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 276.
- ^ Skipwith, p. 281.
- ^ Zinovieff p. 274.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 284–85.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 304. Skipwith, p. 246: "When, on leaving England, I ceased to be a card-holding member of the Party, it was through no disenchantment or change of heart. . . . I left the Party, wishing it well, still considering myself to be a Communist".
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 335–36.
- ^ Skipwith, pp. 259–60 speaks of her guilt at not having been able to save more people.
- ^ Zinovieff, pp. 271, 331.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 190.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 308.
- ^ Zinovieff, p. 311.
- ^ Zinovieff p. 339.
- ^ Sofka Skipwith | Women of Valor: Stories of Women Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust An online exhibition by Yad Vashem retrieved 17 August 2014.
- ^ "Britons honoured for holocaust heroism", The Telegraph 9 March 2010. Retrieved 15 June 2010.