In later chapters, when you learn of almost inconceivable courage and compassion, you will be inspired, but in this and the following chapter, learning of terrible persecutions will not be easy. Digging deep into suffering is painful; we prefer to forget it, but in this case we shouldn’t, just as we shouldn’t forget the stoning, imprisonments, hunger and cold...the conditions under which Paul was ‘more than a conqueror’. The measure of the victory of the faith heroes of Hebrews eleven is the measure of the tribulations they overcame; it is the same with these whose lives we have studied. Throughout this book it is important to keep in mind the conditions under which they learned the lessons which they will teach us...it is the measure of the value of those lessons.

Geoffrey Bull, one of first missionaries ever to enter Tibet, imprisoned by the Chinese communists after their invasion in 1950, for three years endured terrible persecutions...beatings by the guards and brainwashing by the prison authorities, but behind their sadistic behavior, Bull came to understand, was the authority of another. “The nature of the techniques a man faces in these vile prisons declares unquestionably that they are inspired by an intelligence independent of the human kind…There is obviously an unseen spiritual agency at work…The only coherence in the situation comes when we see behind the prison authority the existence of that great counter-force, the adversary of God. This is ‘the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience’. Christ calls him Satan, the prince of this world.”1

Richard Wurmbrand, who spent fourteen and-a-half years in communist prisons, agrees: “It might be in some sense ‘logical’ that communists would arrest priests and pastors as counter-revolutionaries.” (The logic Wurmbrand refers to, which enabled the communists to brand priests and pastors as counter-revolutionaries, is that they robbed the state of its citizens’ time and energy by convincing them to spend time preparing for an eternal paradise…time they insisted should be spent building a workers’ paradise here on earth.) “But why were the priests compelled by the Marxists in the Romanian prison of Pitesti to say Mass over excrement and urine…why would they force a very religious prisoner to be ‘baptized’ daily by putting his head into a barrel in which his fellow sufferers had fulfilled their necessities?...

"Marxism has lifte
its atheistic mask to reveal its true face,the face of Satanism."

...Why did the Romanian Orthodox priest, Roman Braga, whom I knew personally when he was a prisoner of the communists…have his teeth knocked out one by one in order to make him blaspheme?... Marxists are supposed to be atheists who believe in neither heaven nor hell. In their prisons, Marxism has lifted its atheistic mask to reveal its true face, the face of Satanism. Communist persecution of religion might have a human explanation, but the fury of such perverse persecution can only be Satanic.”2 The ‘legal’ authority which persecuted these Christians for being a threat to the revolution was the communist party, but the power behind them was the same enemy which all Christians face today. The more that is known about an enemy the better the chances are for victory over him. Few situations in all of history offer a better opportunity for us to study Satan’s tactics than persecution of Christians by communist regimes. The crimes the Christians were convicted of teach us which truths threaten Satan the most.


"God’s Laws...Unchangeable
Human laws are changeable but
God’s laws are unchangeable!"

“At the trial”, Constantin Caraman told us, “I read in my dossier that I was accused of overturning the public order. It was written there: ‘Caraman said in a sermon that human laws are changeable but God’s laws are unchangeable!’ Someone may ask, ‘How could this be an overturning of the public order?!’ Because communist propaganda says, ‘Our laws never change. Since we became leaders, nothing will ever change, but if you come now and say that our laws can change, it means that someone will change them!’”

"...you can only base morality on God and on eternal unchangeable law."

Father Galeriu told us: “When I got out of prison I was told, ‘You placed too much emphasis on religion, this is the only reason you had to go to the so called, ‘Canal of Death’. I had written an article, ‘War on Morality’, in which I was showing that you can only base morality on God and on an eternal and unchangeable law. I was investigated because of this and in the ‘50’s, for the first time, I was sent to prison, to Vornicu prison.” For Satan, the father of lies, to cause Christians to be imprisoned for speaking and writing those ideas...that God’s laws are unchangeable and that morality can only be based on an eternal and unchangeable law...means not only that these statements must be true, but that for us to promote them is very important. They must pose a severe threat to the kingdom of darkness if voicing them would cause such an extreme reaction in its king. Throughout this book, from Christians who spent a combined total of over a hundred and fifty years in prison for defending them, we will be learning what those eternal and unchangeable laws are.


Ministering to Youth

We were imprisoned
for this crime:
‘enemies of the regime’.

Satan must also be very threatened by young people being taught about Jesus; the communists branded it a crime.

Father Sofian told us: “We held some conferences at Antim monastery about the Christian life. We had no intention of fighting communism. In the library of the monastery priests and old people would gather and we would speak about religious issues regarding the Christian life...about prayer and meditation. Some students would also participate. They had heard about it and felt a great need to come...a desperate need to participate in our discussions. And probably it was their attraction to Antim monastery that disturbed the communists, so they started to arrest different members of our group, which we called ‘The Burning Bush’. There were about sixteen of us.

I was teaching religion…I was condemned to slave labor or death.

Father Giurgiu told us: “I was teaching religion every morning and children would come, over one hundred and fifty of them. I was warned by their (communist) teachers to stop, but I told them, ‘if you don’t like it, try to stop them from coming, but you will not enter my church!’

So in 1959 I was arrested. I was judged and condemned to slave labor or death, according to article 200... ‘Armed attack against the state’.” The measure of Satan’s hate of children being taught about Jesus is the measure of the severity of Father Giurgiu’s treatment for doing so. “They took me from Securitate in Brasov to Codlea prison, then to Aiud prison, then to Jilava prison, and there, like in all places, we were tortured, beaten, all kinds of heinous and terrible tortures. They would tie us on a metal bar, turn us upside down and beat us with a rubber stick with metal inside till you would lose consciousness. I was put in a cell with water up to my knees. In the morning they would flood the cell with water. I had no clothes, nothing, no carpets, just cement. The bed was a cement plate which descended from the wall and in the morning it would be attached back to the wall. I had to stay all day in water up to my knees, without any chair, nothing else in the cell but water! In that cell I was just counting time, expecting to be executed according to the article with penalties...at least fifteen years or execution. But because they could find no compromising documents...no reason for execution, they condemned me to fifteen years of slave labor.”

Winning Souls

Many came to God…
I was accused of fighting against communism.

Pastor Vadan’s dossier was thick with all his ‘illegal’ activities... repairing his church without a permit, forming a choir of more than twenty persons, allowing foreign missionaries to speak in his church...but his worst offense, which earned him prison, was that he was a thief…he stole souls from Satan’s grasp. “I would visit families; this was my duty, to visit the families of our church members, and our neighbors. One lady was a Baptist and her husband, Nicolae, was the secretary of the communist party...he was living near the church. I talked to him about the Word of God. We prayed and sang...he came to God, received Jesus Christ as Lord. Many came to God...they gave up being members of the party which was dangerous for me. I was accused of fighting against communism and causing dissension among party members.”

Nothing, in all of communism’s fifty years of persecuting Christians in Eastern Europe, provides us with a better opportunity for studying our enemy than the so called ‘re-education programs’ at Pitesti and Jilava prisons. “Father Calciu”, Father Sofian told us, “endured experiences far worse than mine. He was taken to a prison which was a laboratory for destroying minds with the purpose of removing their convictions through beatings, tortures, and perversities. They went beyond any human shame. They were forced to undress and beat each other...forced to eat excrements and to drink urine.”

The Diabolical Mind

…a diabolical school, which goes beyond any human thinking…

The Christians’ unity based on their love was the greatest threat to the communists. The purpose of their heinous experiment was for them to learn how to destroy it. Father Calciu told us: “Specifically for the students in Pitesti they invented a diabolical school, which goes beyond any human thinking, and now, having passed through there, we ask ourselves if it was real or just one of our nightmares, for a normal mind couldn’t have conceived of something like that, but only a diabolical mind could! Their intention was to see where and when began the disintegration and destruction of the human soul, or when began the disintegration of a united group because we were very close in that group. They wanted to see how our unity based on love, on the same ideas we shared, on the same faith and morality, how long it could endure. They were only interested to see if we could withstand physically, and those who could not were shot, and they did that unscrupulously. They were making an experiment: the endurance of the human soul that was initiated by the U.S.S.R...where the communists had already made experiments.” Geoffrey Bull called Satan’s influence behind the prison authority an ‘intelligence independent of human kind.’ Father Calciu described it as ‘a diabolical mind’. ‘Diabolical’ means ‘the work of the devil’. It also means ‘to separate, to drive a wedge between people’.

…they tried to see what were the limits of our physical
and psychological endurance.

Satan’s plan…everyone
Separated from everyone else.

These men in the exercise yard of a mental institution are a graphic example of Satan’s finished work. There’s zero human contact, zero communication... everyone separated from everyone else. Relentlessly, for two years in Romania, Satan and his demons, using the guards and prison authorities, conducted their infernal experiment to learn how to best accomplish this very thing. Father Calciu continues: “We were chosen...sixteen political prisoners, and put into a special cell, a large underground cell, seven meters below ground. In that large cell they walled in four small cells...windowless, airless and lighted all the time. The living conditions were dreadful: water continuously running on the walls, the absence of food, no medical treatment, and above all the terror and persecution.

They tried to see what were the limits of our physical and psychological endurance.

In that way they tried to see what were the limits of our physical and psychological endurance. So, they put us into those cells and kept us in a stifling atmosphere so as to get us sick and destroy our lungs. We were forced to live like animals in a pig sty. By getting us sick and being ill continuously, they probably intended to stir us against one another, to start a permanent conflict, for instance, for us to say, ‘Get this man out of here because he is ill and we don’t want to get sick and die’...So they intended to create a cell conflict which would be very destructive and a great tragedy. If you can’t find an element to settle yourself on, a moral unity or a mutual understanding in love, it means that soon you would die. Thirdly the communists wanted to drive us to despair by getting us sick and angry with one another.”

In the cell next to Father Calciu’s, Satan’s tactics were successful. “In the adjoining cell there were two prisoners with sick minds and two mentally healthy. Within a year they all died. They made for one another such an infernal and impossible life that they finally destroyed themselves and died.” If Satan and his demons ever find satisfaction, this is what brings it...to have their victims, with their own words and deeds of hate, become so completely separated, create such infernal and impossible lives for themselves, that they destroy each other. “The last died a particularly horrible death. His name was Ali and he used to be a medical student. And I used to tell him, ‘Ali, I put some medicines for you in the toilet’...Every time we did that Ali used to go to the guards and denounce us. He no longer had the conservation instinct, everything in him was destroyed. He no longer recognized or loved anybody. He wouldn’t ask or accept any help from anybody. The only thing he used to do, regularly, conscientiously, obediently, as if trained, was to tell the guards everything that happened among the prisoners.” Satan hates God. Anything that reminds him of God he works to destroy...and God is Love. Ali’s total separation from all humans, his inability to love, even to receive it, is Satan’s completed diabolical work. Whether on a small scale, between those prisoners or between family members...or on larger scales...between races and religions, Satan works to kill love. “In returning from the naked terror of Red prisons”, Geoffrey Bull wrote after three years in a Chinese prison, “I know there is something worse than the bars, the chains, the firing squads, worse than the heartbreak of confinement and rotting souls with motives gone rancid in the dungeons of defeat. In the cells and corridors, in all the many warders and officials, the interrogators, governors and soldiers, the worst of all was this: I found no evidence of love. They had put Christ out, they had banished God. God is love and where God is usurped there is no love. Is it not significant that hate is the great maxim of the revolution? The one who cannot hate can never go high in the communist party.”3

Demonization

Sin means a demonic presence.
Any sin is in fact a demonizing.

Compulsively, though it meant his fellow prisoners would be beaten, Ali would betray them to the guards. He had been driven to the point of depravity where he was not able not to sin. That’s another of Satan’s goals...to cause us to sin. Most of the horror we’ve heard described...the hate and conflicts stirred up, the perversities and blasphemies, being forced to undress and beat each other...these sins put the prisoners increasingly under Satan’s control. Father Vasile Mihoc, known in Romania as one the Orthodox Church’s best teachers of the New Testament, explains. “People don’t realize what forces are hidden behind sin. When we sin, in fact, we are not alone. Through sin we serve the evil one who is, in a way, the king of sin. Sin means a demonic presence. Each time we sin the devil is there...and the moment you agree to sin, then the devil becomes your master. There are specializations of demons; some encourage more to adultery, others to lust, others to blasphemy and others to curses. Any sin, any submission under the leading of demons, is, in fact, a demonizing. Sometimes demonizing produces physical sickness, sometimes madness.”

We can’t even begin to imagine what, day after day, month after month, the infernal and impossible life created by those demonized prisoners in Ali’s cell must have felt like...what it sounded like. Sabina Wurmbrand, who, along with a group of Christian women, shared a large cell with a group of unbelievers, could. “I was brought to a subterranean cell in the month of November. It was very cold, and there were thousands of women...sentenced for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years. My dear, dear sisters and brethren, as I stand before you should I speak about the hunger which we endured during all those years? We were so hungry that during the nights we could not sleep, we would awake crying: ‘I’m hungry, I’m hungry!’ Nobody could help us! So great was the hunger! We were there Christians with non-Christians...political prisoners, street women, murderers and thieves. It was like in hell!

The swearing and
cursing was worse
than all the tortures.

And when the non-Christians would open their eyes and saw at once where they were, that they are not
home, they started cursing; cursing the prison, cursing their life, cursing God, cursing their mothers…it was like in hell! All together we were very hungry, we were beaten, we were mocked by the communists…but the swearing and cursing at the beginning of the day was worse than all the tortures and all the beatings and all the hunger! We would return at the end of the day from our slave labor and try to come together to pray, but we could not because of the constant cursing.”4

Incessant, blasphemous curses assaulted the Christians’ minds...prayer was impossible. Still, it’s hard to imagine that any sounds, regardless of how vile and loud and persistent, could be worse than hunger and torture. But we believe Sabina. It was mental torture...they were being robbed of their ability to think on things which are pure and holy. Instead, messages of filth and rage were penetrating their consciousness till they were being tormented by their own thought patterns. It was a form of brainwashing, known by its victims to be worse than physical torture because it alone could touch who you were as a person, touch the core of your being...your own thoughts were no longer yours. Pastor Wurmbrand tells us: “Brainwashing...in what does it consist? You have to sit unmoved...the guards will beat you if you move...and during hours, during hours without any stop, you have to hear: ‘There is no God, there is no God, there is no God, there is no God, the story of Christ is a lie, the story of Christ is a lie, Christ has never existed, has never existed, there is no resurrection, there is no heaven, the Bible is a lie, the Bible is a lie, give up, give up, give up, give up, your wife is a whore now and your children are communists now’, and you hear during endless hours: ‘nobody in the world loves you anymore!’ It is mad to hear: ‘there is no God, there is no Christ, there are no angels, there is no wife, there are no children, come on the side of communists!’ and you hear this for weeks and weeks...without any ending.”5

The Assault on Faith

I began believing
Satan was the Messiah,
and other thoughts too
horrible to mention!

It is not only love that will be assaulted in the last days. In Luke 18:8 Jesus asks the astounding question: ‘When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?’ Pastor Wurmbrand was a man of great faith. His words of faith were so strong, so contagious, proved so damaging to the atheism of the guards, that eventually he was put in complete isolation…kept for three years in solitary confinement with zero human contact with instructions to the guards: ‘Don’t speak with this man, his words are dangerous’. The fiercest attack of wickedness possible must have been focused on this spiritual giant. “(I was) drinking the soul destroying poison of the last and worst stages of brainwashing. In the darkest of hopeless days, when with repeated use of torture and a truth drug my mind was worn down, and felt utterly forsaken by God, and could not marshal a single argument to prove that Christ was the Messiah or the existence of God, the devil appeared to me and convinced me I’d followed the wrong man. I began believing Satan was the Messiah and other thoughts too horrible to mention.”5 What Satan nearly accomplished with Pastor Wurmbrand is his ultimate desire. It was the objective of his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness two thousand years ago when he showed him all the Kingdoms of the world. He wants to kill our faith...usurp God’s place in our hearts...he wants our worship.

If we dare to identify with this precious man of God…dare to imagine ourselves month after month starving in a freezing cell…bombarded for seventeen hours a day with repeated taped messages…our faith all but dead…with thoughts too horrible to mention...dare to identify with Sabina and the women tormented with curses worse than hunger and torture, identify, even for a moment, with Father Calciu and the victims of the re-education program...if we dare to do this, then we will become so much more able to benefit from what they will teach us in future chapters…the means by which they survived, even with joy, such concentrated diabolical attacks...how they received great outpourings of grace, restored and strengthened the faith of fellow prisoners, transformed their prison cells…and will become, ourselves, so much better equipped to do the same for the host of wounded ones in these last days.

Perhaps not with real tears, but we cry for these Christians whose suffering has touched our hearts...all for the ‘crime’ of speaking and writing the truth and doing the will of God...we cry for them. But know, without question know, that our God saw and will never forget each of their cries of pain and loneliness and cold and hunger...that each of their cries is a prayer that touches the heart of God...that the suffering of the innocent for Christ is the most powerful prayer possible, certain to be answered. One answer could be you. What they sacrificed for...for the Gospel, for truth, for compassion and love...if what you learn from them in this book causes these to take root and grow in your heart, then your changed life, and the fruit it produces for the Kingdom of God, will have become an answer to their prayers of suffering.

In this first chapter, from what they suffered, we have learned that Satan’s goals include: separating Christians from each other, killing love and faith and inspiring worship of himself. We learned that his tactics include: spreading sickness and terror, stirring up conflict and hatred, driving to despair, and forcing perversities and blasphemies. Anyone who just reads the headlines knows that these are multiplying worldwide at a seemingly exponential rate. Certainly we are witnessing ‘the spread of wickedness in the last days’ referred to in Matthew 24:12. In that verse Jesus issued a solemn warning. ‘Because of it’, He said, ‘the love of most will grow cold’. By sitting at the feet of those whose love, even under the fiercest attacks of evil, remained burning hot, we will, in this book, learn how not to become one of ‘the most’.