Richard Wurmbrand

Richard Wurmbrand was born the youngest of four boys in a Jewish family on
March 24, 1909, in Bucharest, Romania. Gifted intellectually and fluent in nine
languages, Richard was active in leftist politics and worked as a stockbroker. On
Oct. 26, 1936, Richard married Sabina Oster, who was also Jewish. They placed
their faith in Jesus Christ in 1938 as a result of the influence of a German carpenter
named Christian Wölfkes. Richard was ordained as an Anglican, and later
Lutheran, minister. During World War II, Richard and Sabina saw opportunities
for evangelism among the occupying German forces. They preached in bomb
shelters and rescued Jewish children out of the ghettos. Richard and Sabina were
repeatedly arrested and beaten and, at least once, nearly executed. Sabina lost her
Jewish family in Nazi concentration camps.
In 1945, Romanian Communists seized power and a million Russian troops poured
into the country. Pastor Wurmbrand ministered to his oppressed countrymen while
engaging in bold evangelism to the Russian soldiers.
That same year, Richard and Sabina attended the Congress of Cults, organized by
the Romanian Communist government. Many religious leaders came forward to
praise Communism and to swear loyalty to the new regime. Richard walked up to
the podium and declared to the delegates, whose speeches were broadcast to the
whole nation, that their duty was to glorify God and Christ alone.
Between 1945 and 1947, Richard distributed 1 million Gospels to Russian troops,
often disguising the books as Communist propaganda. Richard also helped arrange
the smuggling of Gospels into Russia.
On Feb. 29, 1948, the secret police kidnapped Richard as he traveled to church and
took him to their headquarters. He was locked in a solitary cell and labeled
“Prisoner Number 1.” In 1950, his wife, Sabina, was also imprisoned. She was
forced to serve as a laborer on the Danube Canal project, leaving their 9-year-old
son, Mihai, alone and homeless. He was then taken in by Christian friends, who
risked imprisonment to care for the child of a political prisoner. Sabina was
released after three years, and Richard was also later released, only to be re-
arrested and then released in an amnesty in 1964.
In December 1965, two organizations paid a $10,000 ransom to allow the
Wurmbrand family to leave Romania. Reluctant to leave his homeland, Richard
was convinced by other underground church leaders to leave and become a “voice”
to the world for the underground church. Richard, Sabina and their son, Mihai, left
Romania for Norway and then traveled on to England.
Richard began his ministry of being a voice for persecuted Christians in the West,
where he also wrote his testimony of persecution, Tortured for Christ. Later,
Richard moved to the United States, and in 1967 the Wurmbrands officially began
a ministry committed to serving our persecuted Christian family called Jesus to the
Communist World (later renamed The Voice of the Martyrs). This work continues
today in more than 60 countries where Christians are persecuted.

Richard Wurmbrand

I Have Seen Beautiful Things

Every parent wants their children to believe and follow Christ. One of our favorite
verses is 3 John 1:4. “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are
walking in the truth.” John was referring to his spiritual children, but the
application is the same for parents. Nothing gives us greater joy than to see our
children walking with the Lord and few things bring more sorrow when they stray
from Jesus. But we want it to be easy for them. We bring them to church. We
might have family devotions at home. We send our kids to AWANA or off to
Bible camp. We provide every possible opportunity for them to receive Christ as
their Savior. We assume that if we create the right environment and say all the
right things, they will come to faith in Christ. But it was not so easy for Michael
Wurmbrand, the son of Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand. His father was arrested
and presumed dead.1 His mother was also arrested for her faith in Christ. He was
only eleven years old and he was all alone. It was illegal to help the children of
prisoners. His father picks up the story. At the age of eleven, Mihai began to earn
his living as a regular worker. Suffering had produced a wavering in his faith. But
after two years of my wife's imprisonment, he was allowed to see her. He went to
the communist prison and saw his mother behind iron bars. She was dirty, thin,
with calloused hands, wearing the shabby uniform of a prisoner. He scarcely
recognized her. Her first words were, "Mihai, believe in Jesus. The guards, in a
savage rage, pulled her away from Mihai and took her out Mihai wept seeing his
mother dragged away. This minute was the minute of his conversion. He knew that
if Christ can be loved under such circumstances, He surely is the true Saviour. He
said afterward: "If Christianity had no other arguments in its favor than the fact
that my mother believes in it, this is enough for me." That was the day he fully
accepted Christ.

Richard Wurmbrand spent fourteen years in a Romanian prison thirty feet

underground. During all of that time not once did he ever see the sun, the stars, a
bird or anyone besides his captors and a few prisoners. He didn’t know if his son
and wife were dead or alive. He was told that his wife was dead. He never held a
Bible, he never saw anything with color other than a grey cell and a grey uniform.
He was cut, burned, beaten, starved, brainwashed and tortured in every was
imaginable that entire time.
Wurmbrand was a pastor of the underground church when he was arrested by the
secret police. One of the most famous stories in his book is about a fellow pastor.
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, but had to defend himself all the time. If
he rested a moment, the rats would attack him. He was forced to stand for two
weeks, day and night. The communists wished to compel him to betray his
brethren, but he resisted steadfastly. In the end, they brought his fourteen year-old
son 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. When he could not stand it any
more, 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 to have 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.

Wurmbrand did not just tell stories about other people suffering. He himself
endured unspeakable torture. One was referred to as the icebox torture. Christians
were put in ice-box "refrigerator cells" which were so cold, frost and ice covered
the inside. I was thrown into one with very little clothing on. Prison doctors would
watch through an opening until they saw symptoms of freezing to death, then they
would give a warning and guards would rush in to take us out and make us warm.
When we were finally warmed, we would immediately be put back in the ice-box
cells to freeze—over and over again! Thawing out, then freezing to within just one
minute or two of death, then being thawed out again. It continued endlessly. Even
today sometimes I can't bear to open a refrigerator.

Richard was being moved from prison to prison – from Craiova to Gherla,
Văcăreşti, Malmaison, Cluj, and Jilava. He experienced extreme physical torture
during this time. The guards beat the soles of his feet until the skin tore off, then
again until they exposed bone.

After eight and a half years in prison, Richard was discovered by a Christian doctor
pretending to be a Communist Party member, and was finally released in a general
amnesty in 1956. Strictly warned not to preach, he went immediately back to his
work in the underground church.

In 1959 he was arrested again after an associate conspired against him. He was
accused of preaching against communist doctrine, and sentenced to twenty-five
years in prison. As he embraced his wife before leaving her for the second time,
she encouraged him to keep up their evangelistic work, saying, “Richard,
remember that it is written, ‘You will be brought before rulers and kings to be a
testimony unto them.’”

This time the psychological torture was even worse than physical pain. As Richard
recorded it:

We had to sit seventeen hours with nothing to lean on, and you were not allowed to
close your eyes. For seventeen hours a day we had to hear, “Communism is good,
Communism is good, Communism is good, etc.; Christianity is dead, Christianity
is dead, Christianity is dead, etc.; Give up, give up, etc.” You were bored after one
minute of this but you had to hear it the whole seventeen hours for weeks, months,
years even, without any interruption.
During Richard’s second imprisonment, Sabina was once again told that her
husband had died. This time she did not believe it. In 1964, due to increased
political pressure from Western countries, Richard was once again granted amnesty
and released. Fearing that he would continue getting himself arrested, the
Norwegian Mission to the Jews and the Hebrew Christian Alliance negotiated with
Romanian authorities to release Richard and Sabina from the country for $10,000.
Although at first he refused to leave his home country, Richard was later
convinced by fellow leaders of the underground church to become a voice in the
West for the persecuted church.

In 1966 Richard testified before the US Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee.

During his testimony, he pulled off his shirt to reveal eighteen deep scars from the
torture he had experienced in the communist prisons. “My body represents
Romania, my country, which has been tortured to a point that it can no longer
weep,” he told the subcommittee. “These marks on my body are my credentials.”

In April 1967, Richard and Sabina formed an interdenominational organization to

support the persecuted church in communist countries. They called it Jesus to the
Communist World. But as they expanded their mission to include persecuted
Christians in other parts of the world, including Muslim countries, the organization
was renamed The Voice of the Martyrs. Because of his influential work, Richard
became known as “The Voice of the Underground Church.”

In 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Wurmbrands finally returned
to Romania. They had spent twenty-five years in exile from their homeland. The
Voice of the Martyrs opened a printing facility and bookstore in Bucharest. The
new mayor of the city offered a storage space for their books: under the palace of
former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, where Richard had been held in solitary
confinement for three years.

Though Richard retired from his work with The Voice of the Martyrs in 1992, he
and Sabina continued to support the organization and the world’s underground
churches. Sabina died in 2000 and Richard in 2001.