Richard Wurmbrand, also known as Nicolai Ionescu was born on 24 March 1909 and died on 17 February 2001. He was a Romanian Evangelical Lutheran Pastor and Professor of Jewish descent. Wurmbrand was the youngest of four boys, He lived with his family in Istanbul for a short while. His father died when he was 9, and the Wurmbrands returned to Romania when he was 15.
As an adolescent, he was sent to study Marxism in Moscow, but returned clandestinely the following year. Pursued by Siguranţa Statului (the secret police), he was arrested and held in Doftana prison. When returning to his mother country, Wurmbrand was already an important Comintern agent, leader, and coordinator directly paid from Moscow. Like other Romanian Communists, he was arrested several times, then sentenced and released again.
He married Sabina Oster on 26 October 1936. Wurmbrand and his wife (known as Bintzea to her friends) converted to Christianity in 1938 due to the witness of Christian Wolfkes, a Romanian Christian carpenter; they joined the Anglican Church's Ministry among Jewish people (CMJ UK).
Wurmbrand was ordained twice—first as an Anglican, then, after World War II, as a Lutheran priest. In 1944, when the Soviet Union occupied Romania as the first step to establishing a communist regime, Wurmbrand began a ministry to his Romanian countrymen and to Red Army soldiers; the Socialist Republic of Romania had a doctrine of state atheism. When the government attempted to control churches, he immediately began an "underground" ministry to his people.
In 1948 he publicly said Communism and Christianity were incompatible. Wurmbrand preached at bomb shelters and rescued Jews during World War II. Wurmbrand was a professor in the only Lutheran seminary in his country. Though a devout Lutheran priest, Wurmbrand was highly ecumenical in that he worked with Christians of many denominations.
Anyone who acted contrary to the regime could expect imprisonment or death. At a "Congress of Cults" held by the Communist government, religious leaders stepped forward to swear loyalty to the new regime. Sabrina asked Richard to "wipe the shame from the face of Jesus." Richard replied that if he stepped forward, she would no longer have a husband. "I don't need a coward for a husband," she answered. And so Richard stepped forward and told the 4,000 delegates that their duty as Christians was to glorify God and Christ alone.
He returned home to pastor an underground church and promote the gospel among Rumania's Russian invaders. He smuggled Bibles into Russia, disguised as Communist propaganda. He was arrested on 28/29 February 1948, while on his way to a Divine Service.
Richard was taken to their headquarters and later locked in a solitary cell where he was designated Prisoner Number 1. His years of imprisonment consisted of a ceaseless round of torture and brainwashing. For seventeen hours a day, repetitious phrases were dinned into his ears: Communism is good. Christianity is stupid! Give up. Give up! Over the years, his body was carved in a dozen places and burned. "I prefer not to speak about those [tortures] through which I have passed. When I do, I cannot sleep at night. It is too painful." His jailers also broke many of his bones, including four vertebrae. Miraculously, he survived. Other martyrs did not.
Wurmbrand, who passed through the penal facilities of Craiova, Gherla, the Danube–Black Sea Canal, VăcăreÅŸti prison, Malmaison, Cluj and ultimately Jilava, spent three years in solitary confinement. This confinement was in a cell twelve feet underground, with no lights or windows. There was no sound because even the guards wore felt on the soles of their shoes. He later recounted that he maintained his sanity by sleeping during the day, staying awake at night, and exercising his mind and soul by composing and then delivering a sermon each night.
Due to his extraordinary memory, he was able to recall more than 350 of those, a selection of which he included in his book With God in Solitary Confinement, which was first published in 1969. During part of this time, he communicated with other inmates by tapping out Morse code on the wall. In this way he continued to "be sunlight" to fellow inmates rather than dwell on the lack of physical light
Wurmbrand was released from his first imprisonment in 1956, after eight and a half years. Although he was warned not to preach, he resumed his work in the underground church. He was arrested again in 1959 and sentenced to 25 years. During his imprisonment, he was beaten and tortured. Physical torture included mutilation, burning and being locked in a large frozen icebox.
His body bore the scars of physical torture for the rest of his life. For example, he later recounted having the soles of his feet beaten until the flesh was torn off, then the next day beaten again to the bone, claiming there were not words to describe that pain.
During his first imprisonment, Wurmbrand's supporters were unable to gain information about him; later they found out that a false name had been used in the prison records so that no one could trace his whereabouts. Members of the Secret police visited Sabina posing as released fellow prisoners. They claimed to have attended her husband's funeral.
During his second imprisonment, his wife Sabina was given official news of his death, which she did not believe. Sabina herself had been arrested in 1950 and spent three years in penal labour on the canal. Sabina's autobiographical account of this time is titled The Pastor's Wife. Their only son, Mihai, by then a young adult, was expelled from college-level studies at three institutions because his father was a political prisoner; an attempt to obtain permission to emigrate to Norway to avoid compulsory service in the Romanian army was unsuccessful.
Eventually, Wurmbrand was a recipient of an amnesty in 1964. Concerned with the possibility that Wurmbrand would be forced to undergo further imprisonment, the Norwegian Mission to the Jews and the Hebrew Christian Alliance negotiated with Communist authorities for his release from Romania for $10,000 (though the going rate for political prisoners was $1,900).
He was convinced by underground church leaders to leave and become a voice for the persecuted church. He devoted the rest of his life to this effort, despite warnings and death threats. He was a friend of Costache Ioanid, the Romanian Christian poet.
Wurmbrand travelled to Norway, England, and then the United States. In May 1966, he testified in Washington, D.C., before the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee. That testimony, in which he took off his shirt in front of TV cameras to show the scars of his torture, brought him to public attention. He became known as "The Voice of the Underground Church", doing much to publicise the persecution of Christians in Communist countries. He compiled circumstantial evidence that Karl Marx was a Satanist.
In April 1967, the Wurmbrands formed Jesus to the Communist world, later renamed Voice of the Martyrs, an interdenominational organisation working initially with and for persecuted Christians in Communist countries, but later expanding its activities to help persecuted believers in other places, especially in the Muslim world.
In 1990, he and his wife returned to Romania for the first time in 25 years. The Voice of the Martyrs opened a printing facility and bookstore in Bucharest. The new mayor of Bucharest had offered a storage space for the books under former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's palace, where he had spent years in confinement, praying for a ministry to his homeland. Wurmbrand engaged in preaching with local ministers of nearly all denominations.
Wurmbrand wrote 18 books in English and others in Romanian. His best-known book, titled Tortured for Christ, was published in 1967. In several of them, he wrote very boldly and emphatically against Communism, yet he maintained a hope and compassion even for those who tortured him by "looking at men ... not as they are, but as they will be ... I could also see in our persecutors. a future Apostle Paul ... [and] the jailer in Philippi who became a convert."
Wurmbrand last lived in Palos Verdes, California. He died at the age of 91 on 17 February 2001in a hospital in Torrance, California. His wife, Sabina, had died six months earlier on 11 August 2000. In 2006, he was voted fifth among the greatest Romanians according to the Mari Români poll.
His book Tortured for Christ and Answer to Moscow's (Atheist) Bible. Variations of his works have been translated into more than 65 languages. His son Michael operates the official Richard Wurmbrand Foundation, an Interconfessional Christian Missionary Organization, which offers his fathers books for free.
Richard and Sabina were able to survive their ordeal through the power of love. "If the heart is cleansed by the love of Jesus Christ," wrote Wurmbrand, "and if the heart loves him, you can resist all tortures. What would a loving bride not do for a loving bridegroom? What would a loving mother not do for her child? If you love Christ as Mary did, who had Christ as a baby in her arms, if you love Jesus as a bride loves her bridegroom, then you can resist such tortures. God will judge us not according to how much we endured, but how much we could love. I am a witness for the Christians in communist prisons that they could love. They could love God and men.".
Philadelphia Herald wrote about Wurmbrand saying that “He stood in the midst of lions, but they could not devour him.”
Wurmbrand, Richard. Tortured for Christ. Middlebury, Indiana: Living Sacrifice Books, 1976.
https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1901-2000/prisoner-number-one-richard-wurmbrandt-11630791.html
https://www.persecution.com/founders/
https://www.persecution.com/torturedforchrist/about/who-was-richard-wurmbrand/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wurmbrand
https://christiansforsocialaction.org/resource/heroes-of-the-faith-richard-wurmbrand/
https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/church-history-for-kids/richard-wurmbrand-the-voice-of-the-martyrs-11636191.html
