No Greater Love than This
No Greater Love than This
It is in the deepest dungeon that even a tiny flame can burn as brightly as the sun. Love conquers all.
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Writing this essay, I revisited one of my mom’s books, East Wind. After high school, my sister Janna went to work in Germany for a while. She became friends with her elderly neighbor, Maria Linke, who told her inspiring stories of her 9 years in Stalin’s death camps. It was these stories that ended up in this wonderful book by my mother.
Richard Wurmbrand, author of Tortured for Christ, had this to say about Maria, “By God’s grace this very ordinary woman was enabled to serve Christ in prison in a way she never had in freedom.”
Hold on a minute now. I just wrote the word ‘Christ’, and I can already see the unsubscribe emails piling up in my inbox. Before you do, think for a moment about why that word is so offensive. I encourage everyone to open your mind to possibilities beyond what you have been taught is ‘triggering’—a word you hear everywhere nowadays that I really don’t like. Perhaps you had a negative experience with “religion” in the past. Who hasn’t? But this is not about religion. This is about finding inspiration in the lives of people who stood up for what they believed.
I just read today that adults in the United States are 'suffering' in their lives at a record level. That's according to the latest in a survey series from Gallup.
We have seen nothing yet of suffering in the Western world. I have no wish to minimize anyone’s suffering. I could tell many stories of my own, but if I am honest, it is nothing compared to what someone like Wurmbrand has faced. We have grown soft and the minute we feel stress we have been programed to take a pill or sit on the psychiatrists’ couch, spending billions of dollars for the privilege of complaining about our problems. It is true that the noose is closing in on our freedoms. But we can still make fun of our president, we can join groups of like-minded folk and protest. We can attend meetings. We can practice our faith. There are even a few comedians who still have the courage to actually be funny.
We must prepare for worse to come and gather strength from those who have gone before us. They lived through the most heinous assaults on their freedoms, and they did it with joy, love and compassion in their hearts. How did they do this and what can we learn from them?
Ordinary people like Maria are the real heroes. It just so happened that Maria’s story was told but most ordinary people’s stories are never told. Where would we be without these people who have the courage to stand up to tyranny and do so without ever winning an award, publishing a book, and then die in obscurity? These are the warriors who tip the balance from evil toward good, even if we do not see it with our own eyes, this is what they do. Their contribution to humanity cannot be measured. There are no statistics, no charts to prove what I am saying. But we know this truth in our hearts. If we think the world is bleak now, imagine what it would be without them. And every time the darkness rises up, these warriors rise up to fight it in the spiritual realm.
I met Richard Wurmbrand, his wife, Sabina, and their son, Mihai, when I was a child of 9 years old, shortly before I turned 10, in 1966. Our home in Woodland Hills, California was always filled with people from all over the world who came to see my dad. I well remember the day the Wurmbrands showed up on our doorstep, looking as if they’d been beamed down from heaven.
As a Jew who became a Christian, Richard Wurmbrand was doubly persecuted, both by the Nazis and the communist regime that came after. He spent 14 years in prison for the crime of refusing to deny his faith. In May 1966, he testified before the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee and stripped to the waist to show the scars of eighteen deep torture wounds covering his torso. His story was carried across the world in newspapers throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Wurmbrand was warned in September 1966 that the Communist regime of Romania planned to assassinate him; yet he was not silent in the face of this death threat. Of course not! He had not been silent through years of the worst tortures imaginable.
Nowadays, many people would dismiss witnesses to the faith like Wurmbrand as fools, even dangerous fanatics. The World Economic Forum’s prophet, Yuval Noah Harari, derides those who believe in God as old-fashioned. He tells us, “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”
It is Harari and the other elitists who are the fools.
Stand Harari up next to Wurmbrand. Have them look into each other’s eyes and see Harari’s quickly drop under such a searing gaze. The arrogance of a man who conspires to be God stripped bare before the humility of a man who lives to serve God. These two men stand at opposite ends of a great divide and there will never be a compromise between the two. We are always told to compromise, that we can accomplish so much more if we just give in a little. But that little bit always ends up being more and more. In this battle, there can be no compromise. It is nothing less than good against evil. Wurmbrand has left this earth and has faced his Maker. Yuval has yet to do the same. That reckoning comes for us all.
If you have ever had the privilege of meeting someone like Wurmbrand, you know what I am talking about. I will never forget his face, the depth of suffering and compassion in his eyes, the determination of his jaw, the joy emanating from his spirit. His wife never stopped smiling. There was no bitterness, no hatred of their tormentors. Only love. Their son was so thin, but with the same spirit, just like his parents.
I recently reconnected with Mihai, after all these many years and he immediately remembered spending time with my family. He recalled how my dad had jokingly said, “You must think there’s a communist under every rock in America,” to which Mihai's dad had responded, “No, I think there’s a communist in every home—even under every bed.”
And now, certainly, it isn’t a joke any longer. Communism has infected every area of our lives, every room in our houses. Just think of all the smart homes, the smart phones, Alexa watching over our families. How we are surveilled constantly, and everyone is used to it.
My dad was inspired by the Wumbrands, as well as by Brother Andrew, whom we met in Denmark during our travels, to smuggle Bibles into Romania. I write about this incredible experience in my essay How to Become a Domestic Terrorist. If caught, my parents would have gone to prison. I experienced terror at every border crossing, and then an almost euphoric relief once we made it through. Before each border crossing, Dad prayed that God would blind the eyes of the guards to the suitcase we had filled with Bibles. The guards were thorough in their searches, at one crossing even tearing the lining out of my mom’s purse. Despite checking the tires with special devices and ordering us to take out every suitcase so they could be inspected, it was as if that one brown suitcase was invisible. Things happened on that journey that I can't explain other than that they were miracles.
I have written down these stories so that they can be passed on from generation to generation. At night, when my children went to bed, I told them these stories, and I will tell my grandchildren when they are older, so that the courage of those who went before them will not be forgotten.
Over the past few weeks, I read Tom Robb Smith’s Child 44. It describes the suffering of the millions of ordinary citizens under Stalin who were starved to death while the elite hoarded grain and ate well. It was demanded of ordinary citizens to believe that they lived in “paradise.” Because that’s what communism is—paradise on earth.
I researched Pitesti Prison, (Romanian: Închisoarea Pitești), infamous for mind-breaking and reeducation experiments conducted between December 1949 and September 1951 under the directives of the Communist Party.
And I read Mihai Wurmbrand’s book, Between Hammer & Sickle, which I will write more about here.
I can guarantee, we will be hearing much more about ‘domestic terrorism.’ Those who are already being identified as such—the list is growing longer—what will happen to them?
We have the delightful Katie Couric—what a winning smile she has!— saying what is being repeated everywhere in mainstream media and among the general populace as gospel truth, “And the question is how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump.”
David Atkins, a Contributor @monthly Bylines @theprospect, elected DNC Member from CA, who goes by the pronouns he/him, laments on Twitter:
No seriously...how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook? We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.
To which many responded with chilling suggestions:
Cut them off completely. End the flow of false information suddenly and immediately. Starve out the conspiracies. Let them die. Pump the truth out 24/7 on all platforms remaining.
Give them someone else to follow - I don’t think it’s a coincidence so many are evangelicals. These are followers.
Easy, make a list of trump supporters and start blackballing them from decent society.
They are lost. We start with their kids. We start in kindergarten teaching acceptance and tolerance, the importance of diversity.
James Lindsay, a voice of reason amidst the hysteria, points out an example of the “tolerance” being taught in schools:
No big surprise that he’s now been banned from Twitter. Another one of us that they can’t bear speaking the truth.
How do you deprogram millions of people? What if they don’t want to be deprogramed?
You bring suffering upon the general population and make those millions into the scapegoats. You shut them down. You terrify them. And then, for those who don’t change their ways, you force them into reeducation camps. College campuses have been reeducation camps for years. Our youth have been indoctrinated and it is only getting worse.
A popular diversity-training film for new college students is Blue Eyes, documenting an experiment conducted by Jane Elliott, who now makes a fortune as a sensitivity trainer. As a teacher, Elliott first conducted this experiment with her elementary age students in the 1960s. She divided the kids into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups where the brown-eyed kids are psychologically brutalized while the blued-eyed kids are psychologically empowered. This became a famous lesson in white racism.
Racism is real. But it’s not a ‘white’ thing. Just go to Africa and you will see the brutality of racism played out between groups whose color is anything but white. In America, this white against black is purposely engineered to fragment society. To put focus on the scapegoat group so it will not be on the real criminals—the elite class.
It should be obvious that what Elliott exposes in her experiment is exactly what is happening now with the demonization of the unvaccinated over the past three years, and now the creation of “safe spaces for Blacks” in schools while, conversely, destroying all safe spaces for girls and women. Any guy who ‘identifies’ as a woman can invade women’s spaces.
Yet, if I, as a white woman, decided I was Black, I would be called every vile name under the sun for doing so. I can change my gender, I can call myself a toad, a unicorn, anything, just so long as I don’t say I’m Black. Yet, this makes no sense. We all remember Rachel Dolezal, a woman who had been the head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, who as The Daily Beast described, “became a national laughingstock and social media meme—and was, in fact, a pioneer of a yet-unseen wave of racial imposters.”
Then there’s a BLM activist going by the name Satchuel Paigelyn Cole, who admitted that she's pretended to be black for years.
Here’s her Facebook confession:
“I need to take accountability for my actions and the harm I have done. My deception and lies have hurt those I care most about. I have taken up space (emphasis mine) as a Black person while knowing I am white. I have used Blackness when it was not mine to use…. I am sorry for the harm I have caused. I am sorry for the hurt and betrayal. I will do what I can to show that I want to be a better person.”
Now, let’s replace “Black” with “woman” and imagine it’s a man confessing that he “took up space as a woman” while knowing he is a man.
Just as it made no sense to arbitrarily demonize people with brown eyes, it makes no sense to do the same to whites—that is unless you are purposely creating this atmosphere where it is justifiable to turn one segment of society into the scapegoats.
In Mihai Wurmbrand’s book, Hammer and Sickle, he explains to Westerners why there had been no rebellion in Romania when 18 million had been so ruthlessly oppressed. This is what he said:
Our prisons have been filled with those who have died resisting oppression. Tens of thousands of peasants who resisted collectivization were killed. Their stories have gone untold.
Communism rules by fear, today as in the past. In a city of one and a half millions, Bucharest, there are 90,000 secret police. Every spy spies on his fellow spies. Even when a prisoner is interrogated, there must be several officers who must come up with the same result; if they don’t, one is in trouble. In a Baptist church whose congregation had been reduced by fear and harassment to twenty-one, four were known informers, each checking his neighbor’s story. There is a party boss for every street with spies in every block. They record every visitor, especially overnight callers. All the information is passed on to the secret police.
Acts of defiance towards the police are unknown. Student rebellion? Not when the first critical word against the regime means certain arrest. Not when three people meeting together to grumble about conditions is a “plot” that may end in torture and death.
Mihai Wurmbrand describes how Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, predecessor to Nikoli Ceausescu, wanted to trade with the West but he thought that “the West wouldn’t trade with him so long as he maintained a police state that kept tens of thousands in jails and slave camps. He was stupid. The West would have done business with him anyway. Lloyd George said long ago that trade must be done, even with cannibals. Capitalists are so eager for profit that they will sell to Communists the ropes they need to hang all of them.”
In his eagerness to appease the West, Gheorghe released political prisoners and one of them was Mihai’s father. Mihai describes seeing his father at last.
Faith had kept him alive through fourteen and a half years of prison, had healed lungs riddled with T. B., had mended limbs broken by torture. Later, alone in my room the words of Jesus came into my mind: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” — free even in prison.
Word spread quickly. At the railway station early next morning were dozens of friends and brethren, all the women with their arms filled with flowers. The crowd milled around us. Everyone was looking for a loved one. Then down the track came the ancient coal-burning locomotive, its black belly caked with grime. At a carriage window I saw my father’s face. He stared at the waving, smiling crowd with armfuls of flowers, and for a moment he could not realize that they were his flock and family. He had not expected this.
His head was shaved and he was terribly thin and his clothes were mere rags. Starvation had stripped every ounce of flesh from his face and body, and only his clear blue eyes were unaltered. He had first been taken from us as a vital, handsome man in his thirties, and now he was over fifty.
Weeping, we embraced. Someone had a camera and when the first greetings were over, photographs were taken.
My mother is shown in them smiling a smile of great happiness. My father’s smile is tinged with a deep sadness.
I look as if I’d seen a ghost.
Father had become a living legend.