In his book Live Not by Lies Rod Dreher takes us back to the Eastern Europe of the 1940s and 1950s and cites a number of examples of the suffering Christians experienced at the hands of the Communists in those years. He writes:
The Romania that Soviet troops occupied at the end of World War II was a deeply religious country. After Romanian Stalinists seized dictatorial control in 1947, among the most vicious anti-Christian persecution in the history of Soviet-style communism began.Historian Hannah Arendt, in her magisterial work The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote of both the Communists and the Nazis that "It is because men lost their belief in a final judgment that they became monsters. The best had no hope and the worst lost all fear." When men no longer believe there's any accountability for how they behave they're capable of the most monstrous behavior.
From 1949 to 1951, the state conducted the “Piteşti Experiment.” The Piteşti prison was established as a factory to reengineer the human soul. Its masters subjected political prisoners, including clergy, to insane methods of torture to utterly destroy them psychologically so they could be remade as fully obedient citizens of the People’s Republic.
Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, held captive from 1948 until he was ransomed into Western exile in 1964, was an inmate at Piteşti. In 1966 testimony before a US Senate committee, Wurmbrand spoke of how the communists broke bones, used red-hot irons, and all manner of physical torture.
They were also spiritually and psychologically sadistic, almost beyond comprehension. Wurmbrand told the story of a young Christian prisoner in Piteşti who was tied to a cross for days. Twice daily, the cross bearing the man was laid flat on the floor, and one hundred other inmates were forced by guards to urinate and defecate on him.
Then the cross was erected again and the Communists, swearing and mocking, “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it.
Wurmbrand asked the priest how he could consent to commit such sacrilege. The Catholic priest was “half-mad,” Wurmbrand recalled, and begged him to show mercy. All the other prisoners were beaten until they accepted this profane communion while the communist prison guards taunted them.
Wurmbrand told the American lawmakers: "I am a very insignificant and a very little man. I have been in prison among the weak ones and the little ones, but I speak for a suffering country and for a suffering church and for the heroes and the saints of the 20th century; we have had such saints in our prison to which I did not dare to lift my eyes."
After his release, Pastor Wurmbrand, who died in 2001, devoted the rest of his life to speaking out for persecuted Christians. “Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”
Lurking in the heart of every man is a capacity for unimaginable evil. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent years suffering in the Soviet prison camps called the Gulag, observed that "“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts."
In his book Tortured for Christ, Wurmbrand echos Arendt. He writes,
When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man. The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish." I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I do not believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."Here's an excerpt from his book:
A pastor by the name of Florescu was tortured with red hot iron pokers and with knives. He was beaten very badly. Then starving rats were driven into his cell through a large pipe. He could not sleep because he had to defend himself all the time. If he rested a moment the rats would attack him.Some like to think that human beings are basically good, but history doesn't offer much support for that belief.
He was forced to stand for two weeks, day and night. The Communists wished him to betray his brethren, but he resisted steadfastly. Eventually they brought his fourteen year-old son to the prison and began to whip the boy in front of his father, saying that they would continue to beat him until the pastor said what they wished him to say.
The poor man was half-mad. He bore it as long as he could, then he cried to his son, "Alexander, I must say what they want! I can't bear your beating anymore!"
The son answered, "Father, don't do me the injustice of having a traitor as a parent. Withstand! If they kill me I will die with the words, 'Jesus and my fatherland.'" The Communists, enraged, fell upon the child and beat him to death, with blood spattered over the walls of the cell. He died praising God. Our dear brother Florescu was never the same after seeing this.
Handcuffs with sharp nails on the inside were placed on our wrists. If we were totally still they didn't cut us. But in the bitterly cold cells, when we shook with cold, our wrists would be torn by the nails.
Christians were hung upside down on ropes and beaten so severely that their bodies swung back and forth under the blows. Christians were also placed in ice-box "refrigerator cells," which were so cold that frost and ice covered the inside. I was thrown into one while I had very little clothing on. Prison doctors would watch through an opening until they saw symptoms of freezing to death, then they would give a signal and guards would rush in to take us out and make us warm.
When we were finally warmed, we would immediately be put back into the ice-box cells to freeze. Thawing out, then freezing to within minutes of death, then being thawed out - over and over again! Even today there are times when I can't bear to open a refrigerator.
We Christians were sometimes forced to stand inside wooden boxes only slightly larger than we were. This left no room to move. Dozens of sharp nails were driven into every side of the box, with their razor-sharp points sticking through the wood. While we stood perfectly still, it was all right. But we were forced to stand in these boxes for endless hours; when we became fatigued and swayed with tiredness, the nails would pierce our bodies.
If we moved or twitched a muscle - there were the horrible nails.
What the Communists have done to Christians passes any possibility of human understanding. I have seen Communists whose faces while torturing believers shone with rapturous joy. They cried out while torturing Christians, "We are the devil!"
Around the world today, particularly in many Muslim countries and Communist countries like China and North Korea, Christians still suffer because they seek to model their lives after that of their Master whose own torture and death is commemorated on Friday. Voice of the Martyrs, the organization founded by Pastor Wurmbrand in 1966, is a good resource for those wishing to learn about the nature and extent of that suffering today.