Sofka Skipwith (born Sophia Petrovna Dolgorukova, ; 23 October 1907Sofka Zinovieff, Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life, 2007, New York: Pegasus, 2008, . – 26 February 1994Frida Knight, "Obituary: Sofka Skipwith", The Independent 8 March 1994.) 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 Dolgorukov and Countess Sophy Bobrinskaya (of House Bobrinsky). Her parents were married in 1907 in a service at a private church in the Winter Palace, followed by a service at the Bobrinsky Palace; the Romanov imperial family were in attendance. Skipwith's granddaughter in her biography Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life repeats her grandmother's claim that the "wedding was considered the most brilliant of the 1907 season."
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.Sofka Skipwith, Sofka: The Autobiography of a Princess, London: Hart-Davis, 1968, , pp. 12–13. Skipwith's paternal grandfather, "Sandik," was Grand Marshal of the Imperial Court and Master of Ceremonies; Skipwith remembered him as ""a rather terrifying figure.'"
On her mother's side she was descended from Catherine the Great's illegitimate son, Count Bobrinsky, and also from a foundling (abandoned child) who was probably the child of the Tsar's brother.Skipwith, pp. 13–14. As a young girl in Saint Petersburg, she occasionally played with the Tsarevich.Skipwith, p. 25. Her mother, Sophy, whose father was the Marshal of the Russian Nobility, president of the Union of the Nobility of the Russian Provinces, and a Knight of the Order of Saint Alexander Nevsky, studied medicine and became a respected surgeon,Zinovieff, p. 44. learned to fly in 1913 and was one of the first female bomber pilots,Zinovieff, pp. 66–67.Skipwith, p. 32. was the only female participant in a motor rally from St. Petersburg to Kiev in 1912, and also published satirical poetry under a pseudonym.
In 1916, Sofia Alekseevna returned from medical service in the Russian military with malaria and two St. George crosses,Zinovieff, p. 65. and after the October Revolution she re-entered Bolshevik Russia and secured the release of her second husband from prison,Zinovieff, pp. 99–100, 107–17. and subsequently supported him in Paris by driving a taxi.Zinovieff, p. 150. She gave her daughter a diminutive of her name.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's parents divorced when she was four,Skipwith, p. 18. and she grew up mainly with her paternal grandmother and an English governess.
When the Revolution occurred, Skipwith's grandmother took her with her to 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.Zinovieff, pp. 90–95Skipwith, pp. 35, 48–49, 54–56. 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"Skipwith, p. 75.), Nice, Paris and finally Dieppe.
During her time in London she "thoroughly enjoyed" going to school at Queen's College,Skipwith, p. 58. 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.Skipwith, pp. 68–70; the obituary in The Independent interprets this as completing her education in Scotland.
In Nice, she studied at the Lycée, managed to pass the Certificat d'Etudes Secondaires, but did not even try to pass the Baccalauréat.Skipwith, pp. 80–81, 96–97. In Rome, she had her first love affair and also read avidly, influenced by a Russian librarian at the English Library.Skipwith, pp. 71–73.
Secretarial work On her mother's suggestion, Skipwith qualified as a French and English shorthand-typist at the Ecole Pigier in DieppeSkipwith, pp. 101–02. and at 21, after a series of unsatisfactory temporary jobs, became the Duchess of Hamilton's secretary. This included speaking with her at events on behalf of the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, and organising the wedding of Margaret and James Drummond-Hay, at which she was one of twelve bridesmaids in rainbow colours.Zinovieff, pp. 161, 164–65. In her memoirs, she tells of the butler bursting in on her while she was dressing for the pre-wedding dinner, taking no notice of her being "attired in nothing but bra and panties": "'Your Highness', he gasped . . . 'I can't do it. Lord Malcolm has telephoned that there will be eight more to dinner'", whereupon she and "a couple of footmen" saved the day with an arrangement of trestle tables in a passage.Skipwith, pp. 113–14. She also pretended to have lost her refugee Nansen passport and so acquired a British passport.Skipwith, p. 116.
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.Zinovieff, p. 175. For eighteen months she worked only intermittently, translated her mother's book, and went to and gave parties.Skipwith, p. 124. 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.Skipwith, pp. 125–27. 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.Skipwith, pp. 131–33.
Second marriage and wartime internment She and Zinovieff separated amicably and after her second son was born, divorced following the instructions in A.P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock and guidance from a solicitor.Skipwith, pp. 140, 143–44. Shortly after the Oliviers separated, she married Grey Skipwith, heir to a baronetcy, and they lived for a while in the Oliviers' house in Cheyne Walk.Skipwith, p. 154. Olivier gave them as a wedding present a replica of his own then unusually large bed, with appropriate-sized linen and blankets.Zinovieff, p. 200.Skipwith, p. 158. They decided to leave London for the children's sakes and leased Dean Cottage in Cookham Dean, near Maidenhead.Zinovieff, pp. 201–02. After her third son was born in September 1938, they decided to relocate to Paris and concentrate on translating; they arranged a rental and were to have moved in September 1939 – they spent the summer travelling with a troupe of Cossacks, camping with their dog at each stopSkipwith, pp. 161–62, 164–66. – but the outbreak of World War II made moving to Paris impossible and since they had given up the lease at Cookham Dean, they pitched their tent on the public house lawn before moving back to Chelsea.
Skipwith's husband joined the military, first a patrol boat and then the RAF. She was worried about her mother, who had been depending on the money she sent her, and during the Phoney War secured a visa through connections, went to Paris for a month and paid her mother's and stepfather's rent for six months.Skipwith, p. 169. However, on her second trip in mid-May 1940, she was trapped in Paris when the Germans occupied it, and three days before she was to have been smuggled out of the country, was rounded up with other British nationals and sent to an internment camp at Besançon.Skipwith, pp. 171, 188–89, 191.Zinovieff's The Daily Telegraph summary incorrectly says two days. In May 1941 they were transferred to a multinational show camp located in the Grand Hotel and other spa hotels at Vittel.Skipwith, p. 199.Zinovieff refers to it in The Daily Telegraph article as "what [the Germans] considered a model camp". (She and her friends were indignant at the overly rosy picture of the camp in the film Two Thousand Women, which they saw in 1947.Skipwith, p. 279.) In 1942 she was informed that her husband's plane had been shot down and later that he was dead.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.
During her time in internment, Skipwith repeatedly tried to help people escape,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. and smuggled messages and cigarettes and other items from Red Cross parcels to the French Resistance, especially after about 250 Polish Jews who had paid for useless certifications of South American citizenship arrived at a separate part of the camp.Skipwith, p. 222-23. She wrote out the list of their names in tiny script on cigarette papers and sent multiple copies via the French Communist Party to Geneva and to Spain, which was supposedly representing the South American countries.Skipwith, p. 225. In 1985 Skipwith learned from Abraham Oppenheim, a researcher at the London School of Economics, that thanks to her list of names, over 50 of the Vittel Jews had been taken from a transport to Auschwitz and were among 222 Jews exchanged for Germans and sent to Palestine.Zinovieff, pp. 337–38. One eleven-year-old girl was sent out to be hidden by a local family.Skipwith, p. 232. Skipwith and a friend smuggled a baby out under the fence in a basket.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". One woman feigned paralysis with the assistance of the Jewish camp doctor and so saved herself and her children.Skipwith, p. 231. But the majority who had not killed themselves when the transport trains arrived at Vittel were shot after staging a rebellion on arrival at the death camp;Zinovieff pp. 336–37. for many years, all Skipwith knew was that they had been taken to the gas chambers despite her efforts to contact their relatives.Skipwith, p. 238.
Skipwith was repatriated to England in August 1944, after having refused earlier opportunities to continue trying to help the Poles.Skipwith pp. 229, 238, 247. 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.Skipwith, pp. 240–46.