NEW GLASGOW
Imagine being locked in a pitch-black cell with only rats and dripping water for comfort.
Now imagine staying there day after day, month after month, year after year.
This was reality for Richard Wurmbrand in Communist Romania, being imprisoned and tortured for refusing to renounce his faith in Jesus.
Last Friday, actor Dennis Hassell brought Wurmbrand’s faith alive for people at New Glasgow’s First Baptist Church on East River Road in his play ‘Solitary Refinement,’ run by Voice of the Martyrs Canada.
“It helped me to understand it a bit better and how the world actually is really,” said Carmen Mercer, a regular at the church. “It’s very difficult to comprehend it because we’ve not lived it.”
Born into a Romanian Jewish family, Wurmbrand converted to Christianity before the Second World War and managed to survive the fascist regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu, an ally of Nazi Germany.
His troubles started after Soviet troops invaded Romania in 1944 and Wurmbrand started an underground church preaching to both his fellow Romanians and Russian soldiers.
After refusing to swear loyalty to the new Communist dictatorship, Wurmbrand was arrested in 1948.
He spent three years in solitary confinement – held in a soundproof underground cell – and was released in 1956, whereupon he returned to his underground church.
He was arrested again in 1959 and suffered torture including mutilation, burning and being forced into a frozen ice box. During another torture session guards lashed the soles of his feet, ripping flesh off until the bone was exposed.
After being released under a 1964 amnesty, Wurmbrand went to Norway, Britain and finally the United States. He was allowed to leave Romania after the Norwegian Mission to the Jews and the Hebrew Christian Alliance paid a $10,000 ransom to the Communist dictatorship.
Three years after his release, Wurmbrand founded the group Jesus to the Communist World, later renamed Voice of the Martyrs, which today helps persecuted Christians worldwide.
“It is an emotional obstacle course,” said Hassell of playing Wurmbrand.
For him, it means mentally climbing over the prison walls and under barbed wire to get inside Wurmbrand’s jail cell, an emotionally draining process.
The ultimate aim was to build the audience’s empathy with Wurmbrand’s suffering by recreating his jail cell onstage, as well as sounds like dripping water, guard dogs barking and the clanging of doors.
As Hassell recounts Wurmbrand’s life story, images of warfare and dictatorship like Joseph Stalin’s face are used.
Other, more normal images were projected onto the wall, such as the inside of a Bucharest street car or photos of a Communist-era apartment similar to the one lived in by Wurmbrand, his wife Sabina and their children.
“We want to immerse the audience, so that’s why we put a five-channel [surround sound] so that you can hear from behind,” said Hassell.
While Romania is now free, Voice of the Martyrs is still helping Christians facing persecution around the world.
In China, Vietnam, Iran and elsewhere, underground congregations face mass arrests, torture and even execution.
The threat is even more severe in North Korea and Syria/Iraq, where ISIS terrorists launched a full-scale genocide against religious minorities before their defeat on the battlefield.
