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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.
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 icebox cells to freeze. Thawing out, then freezing to within minutes of death, then being thawed out - over and over again!
We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers of evil. We saw that communism is not from people but from the devil. It is a spiritual force - a force of evil and can only be countered by a greater spiritual force, the Spirit of God.
The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a person has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human.
As they allowed no place for Jesus in their hearts, I decided I would leave not the smallest place for Satan in mine.
Christians tied to crosses for four days and nights. The crosses were placed on the floor and hundreds of prisoners had to fulfil their bodily necessities over the faces and bodies of the crucified ones. Then the crosses were erected again and the Communists jeered and mocked: Look at your Christ! How beautiful he is! What fragrance he brings from heaven!' I described how, after being driven nearly insane with tortures, a priest was forced to consecrate human excrement and urine and give Holy Communion to Christians in this form.
'The Communist police discovered that she secretly spread Gospels and taught children about Christ They decided to arrest her. But to make the arrest as agonizing and painful as they could, they decided to delay her arrest a few weeks, until the day she was to be married. On her wedding day, the girl was dressed as a bride - the most wonderful, joyous day in a girl's life! Suddenly, the door burst open and the secret police rushed in. When the bride saw the secret police, she held out her arms towards them to be handcuffed. They roughly put the manacles on her wrists. She looked towards her
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There is only one method of resistance to brainwashing: it is 'heart washing'. If the heart is cleansed by the love of Jesus Christ, and if the heart loves Him, one can resist all tortures. What
God will judge us not according to how much we endured, but how much we could love. The Christians who suffered for their faith in prisons could love. I am a witness that they could love God and humanity.
One great lesson arose from all the beatings, tortures and butchery of the Communists: that the spirit is master of the body. We felt the torture, but it often seemed as something distant and far removed from the spirit which was lost in the glory of Christ and His presence with us.
Therefore, tortures endured in Communist prisons have not made me hate Communists. They are God's creatures; how can I hate them? But neither can I be their friend. Friendship means one soul in two breasts. I am not one soul with the Communists. They hate the notion of God. I love God.
It was in being tortured by them that we learned to love them.
Even the ministers of the interior like Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, who seemed to have all power in hand, ended just like the last counter-revolutionary: with a bullet in the neck.
Converted atheists and Communists love Christ much, because they have sinned very much.
Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet writer, says that if Stalin had done nothing else all of his life than to write the names of his innocent victims, his life would not have been long enough to finish the job.
Many Communists commit suicide. So did their greatest poets, Essenin and Maiakovski. So did their great writer Fadeev. He had just finished his novel called Happiness in which he had explained that happiness consists in working tirelessly for communism. He was so happy about it that he shot himself after having finished the novel. It was too difficult for his soul to bear such a great lie.
