Wurmbrand and the Nazi

We received twenty-five strokes each and afterwards were moved to an isolation cell. There, alone on a bunk, lying face down, I found Gaston. He, too, had been beaten. His back was a mass of bloody wounds. We tried to ease the pain with applications of a shirt soaked in water, and when the worst had passed, I examined the raw flesh for splinters of wood. His body shook as if in a fever. He could not speak much at first, but slowly, in broken phrases, he explained that he had been punished for preaching. A prisoner had informed on him.

He said, “I want to tell you something...”

“You mustn't talk.”

“Now or never. About Professor Popp...and the pastor who betrayed him...” He stopped, his lips trembling.

“You needn't tell me,” I began.

“I couldn't stand the pressure! I've suffered. When he died...” he began to sob.

We prayed together. He said that he could never forgive himself.

“The Professor didn't [forgive me], how could anyone?” he asked.

“Of course they can. So would Popp if he had known everything,” I said. “Let me tell you about a man who was far worse than you. It will help us pass the night. He was the murderer of my wife's family. She forgave him, and he became one of our closest friends. There are only two men my wife kisses—her husband, and the man who murdered her family.” I told Gaston the story.

When Rumania entered the war on Germany's side, a pogrom began in which many thousands of Jews were killed or deported. At Iasi alone 11,000 were massacred in a day. My wife, who shares my Protestant faith, is also of Jewish origin. We lived in Bucharest, from which the Jews were not deported, but her parents, one of her brothers, three sisters and other relatives who lived in Bucovine were taken to Transmistria, a wild border province which the Rumanians had captured from Russia. Jews who were not murdered at the end of this journey were left to starve, and there Sabina's family died.

I had to break this news. She recovered herself and said, “I will not weep. You are entitled to a happy wife, and Mihai to a happy mother, and our Church to a servant with courage.” If she shed tears in private I do not know, but from that day I never saw Sabina weep again.

Some time later our landlord, a good Christian, told me sadly of a man who was staying in the house while on leave from the front. “I knew him before the war,” he said, “but he's changed completely. He has become a brute who likes to