Christ in the Communist Prisons Also by REVEREND RICHARD WURMBRAND

Christ in the Communist Prisons Also by REVEREND RICHARD WURMBRAND CHRIST ON THE JEWISH ROAD today's martyr church tortured for CHRIST WURMBRAND's LETTERS CHRIST IN THE COMMUNIST PRISONS Reverend Richard Wurmhrand Edited hj Charles Foley COWARD-McCANN, INC. New York This hook is dedicated to the memory of those who died for God and fatherland in Communist prisons First American Edition 1968 Copyright (g) 1968 by Richard Wurmbrand All rights reserved. This hook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the Publisher, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-11879 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Christ in the Communist Prisons Chapter One T« first half of my life ended on February 29, 1948. I was walking from our home to my church nearby when a black Ford braked sharply beside me and two men jumped out, seized my arms and shoved me into the back seat, while a third, beside the driver, kept me covered with an automatic. The car sped through the cold, gray streets of Bucharest and turned in through steel gates in Calea Rahova street. My kidnappers belonged to the Communist Secret Police and this was their headquarters. Inside, my papers, my belong ings, my tie and shoelaces, and finally my name were taken from me. "From now on," said the official on duty, "you are Vasile Georgescu." It was a common name, easy to forget. The authorities did not want even the guards to know the identity of their pris oner, in case the secret should leak out and questions be asked abroad, where I was well-known. Like so many others, I was to disappear without a trace. Calea Rahova was a new jail and I was its first prisoner. But prison was no new experience for me. I had been arrested dur ing the war by the Fascists who ruled in Hitler's day, and again when the Communists took over. There was a small window high in the concrete wall of the cell, two plank beds, the usual 7 CHRIST IN THE COMMUNIST PRISONS bucket in the corner. I sat waiting for the interrogators, know ing what questions they would ask and what answers I must give. I know what fear is well enough, but at the moment I felt none. This arrest, and all that would follow, was the answer to a prayer I had made, and I hoped that it would give new meaning to my past life. I did not know what strange and won derful discoveries lay in store for me. My father had a book at home which advised young people how to plan a career as a lawyer, a doctor, an army officer and so forth. Once, when I was about five, he took it down from the library shelf and asked my brothers what they would like to be. When they'd chosen, my father turned to me, the youngest child. "And what will you be, Richard?" I looked at the title of the book, A General Guide to the Professions^ and thought about it for a while. Then I replied, "I'd like to be a general guide." Since then almost fifty years have passed, fifteen of them in prison, and I have often considered those words. It's said that we make our choices early in life, and I know no better descrip tion of my present work than that of "general guide." The idea of becoming a Christian pastor was, however, far from my thoughts, and from those of my Jewish parents. My father died when I was nine, and our family was always short of money, and often of bread. A man once offered to buy me a suit of clothes, but when we entered the store, and the tailor brought out his best, he said, "Much too good for a boy like this." I still remember his voice. My schooling was erratic and uninspiring, but we had many books at home. Before I was ten I'd read them all and became as great a skeptic as the Vol taire I admired. Yet religion interested me. I observed the rituals in Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, and once in a synagogue I saw a man I knew praying for his sick daughter. She died the next day, and I asked the rabbi,"What God could refuse such a desperate prayer?" and he had no answer. I couldn't believe in an all-powerful being who left so many peo ple to starve and suffer, still less that he had put on earth one man of such goodness and wisdom as Jesus Christ. 8 Chapter One As I grew up, I took my pleasures where I could, determined to make up for lost time. Entering the business world of Bucharest, by the time I was twenty-five I had advanced to the managership of an import-export firm with plenty of scope for financial chicanery. Now I had money to burn in the brothels and nightclubs of "Little Paris," as they called the capital. I didn't care what happened so long as my appetite for fresh sensation was satisfied. It was a life many envied, yet it left me deeply dissatisfied. I knew it to be counterfeit and that I was throwing away something in me that was good and could be put to use. Although I was sure there was no God, I wished in my heart that it might be otherwise, that there should be a reason for existence. One evening, I wandered idly into a church and joined a group of worshippers before a statue of the Virgin. Though I tried, too, to join them in their "Hail, Mary," I felt quite empty. I said to the image, "Really, you're like stone. So many plead, and you have nothing for them." After my marriage I continued to pursue other women. I didn't ask myself if it was honest. I wanted to hurt everyone. Cheating, lying and pleasure-seeking formed the substance of my days. When I was twenty-seven the combination of early privations and later excesses brought on tuberculosis, at that time still considered a dangerous disease. The doctor sent me to a sani tarium, deep in the countryside, and there for the first time in my life I rested. Looking out at the peaceful woods, I began to review my disordered past. My mother, my wife, so many in nocent girls had wept for me. I had seduced, slandered and connived,jmd all for nothing. In that sanatorium I prayed for the first time in my life, the prayer of an atheist. I said something like this: "God, I know that You do not exist. But if by any chance You do, which I deny, it's up to You to reveal Yourself to me; it is not my duty to seek You." My whole philosophy had been materialistic until then, but my heart could not be satisfied with it. I believed that man is only matter and that, when he dies, he decomposes into salt and minerals. Yet I had lost my father, and had attended other funerals, and I could never think of the dead except as people. 9 CHRIST IN THE COMMUNIST PRISONS It is always the beloved person who remains in the mind. Can we be so utterly mistaken? My heart was full of contradictions. I'd spent many hours in noisy nightclubs, but I also liked to take lonely wall« through cemeteries—sometimes on winter days when snow lay heavy on the graves. I told myself: "One day, I, too, will be dead, and snow will fall on my tomb, while the living will laugh, embrace and enjoy life. I shall be unable to participate in their joys; I shall not even know them. I'll simply not exist any more. After a short time, no one will remember me. So what use is any thing?" I remembered reading that Krupp, who'd become a mil lionaire by creating weapons of death, was himself terrified of death. No one was allowed to mention it in his presence. He divorced his wife because she told him about the death of a nephew. He had everything, but was haunted because he knew that his happiness couldn't last, that he would have to leave it behind and rot in a tomb. Although I had read the Bible for its literary interest, my mind closed at the point where the adversaries challenge Christ: "Descend from the cross if you are the Son of God"; and, instead. He dies. It seemed to prove His foes right. Yet, I found my thoughts going spontaneously to Christ, and I said to myself, "I wish I could have met and talked with Him." Each day my meditation ended with this thought. There was a woman patient in the sanitorium, too ill to leave her room, who somehow heard of me and sent me a book about the Brothers Ratisbonne, who founded an order to convert Jews. I was touched to think that others were praying for me, a Jew, while I did all I could to waste my life. After some months in the sanitorium, my condition im proved slightly and I went to convalesce in a mountain village where I became friendly with an old carpenter. One day he gave me a Bible. Only later did I discover that it was no ordi nary Bible: he and his wife had spent hours every day praying over it for me.

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