In God's Underground by Richard Wurmbrand

"The first half of my life ended on February 29, 1948. I was walking alone down a street in Bucharest when a black Ford car braked sharply beside me and two men jumped out. They seized my arms and thrust me into the back seat, while a third man beside the driver kept me covered with a pistol. The car sped through the thin traffic of a Sunday evening; the, in a street called Calea Rahova, we turned in through steel gates. I heard them clang behind us.....

I was kept in solitary confinement in this cell for the next two years. I had nothing to read and no writing materials; I had only my thoughts for company, and I was not a meditative man, but a soul that had rarely known quiet. I had God. But had I really lived to serve God-or was it simply my profession?

Did I believe in God? Now the test had come. I was alone. There was no salary to earn, no golden opinions to consider. God offered me only suffering-would I continue to love Him?

Slowly, I learned that o the tree of silence hangs the fruit of peace. I began to realize my real personality, and made sure that it belonged to Christ. I found that even here my thoughts and feelings turned to God, and that I could pass night after night in prayer, spiritual exercise and praise. I knew now that I was not play-acting. I BELIEVED."

Richard Wurmbrand began a secret, "underground" ministry both to captive Romanians and to Soviet soldiers in the invasion force following the Communist seizure of  Romania in 1945.

Arrested in 1948, he was committed to prison where, according to his testimony before the U.S. Internal Security Subcommittee in May, 1966, he served three years in solitary confinement and five additional years in "mass" cells, during which time he was subjected to medieval tortures. As proof of these tortures, he bared his body above the waist, where committee members viewed more than a dozen of his Communist-inflicted scars.

His wife, Sabina Wurmbrand, was also arrested in 1948 and separately imprisoned for three years, during which time she served as a slave laborer on the never-completed Danube Canal.

Following his 1957 release, Wurmbrand resumed his underground work; rearrested in 1959, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. A general amnesty in 1964 again brought his release and resumption of his underground work. Finally, in 1965, in great danger of a third arrest and imprisonment, he was "ransomed" out of Romania by Christian friends in Norway, who paid $10,000 to the Romanian Communist authorities for his release.

Through the work of The Voice of the Martyrs  worldwide, the underground church continues to receive bibles, Christian literature, and relief to families of martyrs

In God's Underground by Richard Wurmbrand can be found at
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