I was orphaned from the first years of life. Being brought up in a family in which no religion was recognized, I received no religious education as a child. As the result of a bitter childhood, which included knowing poverty in the difficult years of World War I, at age fourteen I was as convinced an atheist as the Communists are today. I had read atheistic books, and it was not just that I did not believe in God or Christ—I hated these
notions, considering them harmful for the human mind. So I grew up with bitterness toward religion.
But as I understood afterward, I had the grace to be one of the chosen of God for reasons that I don’t understand. These reasons had nothing to do with my character, because my character was very bad.
Although I was an atheist, something unreasonable always attracted me to churches. I
found it difficult to pass a church without entering it. However, I never understood what was happening in these churches. I listened to the sermons, but they didn’t appeal to my heart. I had an image of God as a master whom I should have to obey. I hated this wrong image of God that I had in my mind, but I would have liked very much to know that a loving heart existed somewhere in the center of this universe. Since I had known few of the joys of childhood and youth, I longed that there should be a loving heart beating for me, too.
I convinced myself that there was no God, but I was sad that such a God of love did not exist. Once, in my inner spiritual conflict, I entered a Catholic church. I saw people kneeling and saying something. I thought, I will kneel near them so I can hear what they say and repeat the prayers to see if something happens. They said a prayer to the holy virgin, “Hail Mary, full of grace.” I repeated the words after them again and again; I looked at the statue of the virgin Mary, but nothing happened. I was very sad about it.
One day, being a very convinced atheist, I prayed to God. My prayer was something like this: “God, I know surely that You do not exist. But if perchance You exist, which I contest, it is not my duty to believe in You; it is Your duty to reveal Yourself to me.” I was an atheist, but atheism did not give peace to my heart.
During this time of inner turmoil, an old carpenter in a village high up in the mountains of Romania prayed like this: “My God, I have served you on earth and I wish to have my reward on earth as well as in heaven. And my reward should be that I should not die before I bring a Jew to Christ, because Jesus was from the Jewish people. But I am poor, old, and sick. I cannot go around and seek a Jew. In my village there are none. Bring a Jew into my village and I will do my best to bring him to Christ.”
Something irresistible drew me to that village. I had no reason to go there. Romania has twelve thousand villages, but I went to that one. Seeing I was a Jew, the carpenter courted me as never a beautiful girl had been courted. He saw in me the answer to his prayer and gave me a Bible to read. I had read the Bible out of cultural interest many times before. But the Bible he gave me was another kind of Bible. As he told me some time later, he and his wife prayed together for hours for my conversion and that of my wife. The Bible he gave me was written not so much in words, but in flames of love fired by his prayers. I could barely read it. I could only weep over it, comparing my bad life with the life of Jesus; my impurity with His righteousness; my hatred with His love—and He accepted me as one of His own.
Soon thereafter, my wife was converted. She brought other souls to Christ. Those other souls brought still more souls to Christ, and so a new Lutheran congregation arose in Romania.
Then came the Nazis under whom we suffered much. In Romania, Nazism took the form of a dictatorship of extreme orthodox elements that persecuted Protestant groups as well as the Jews.
Even before my formal ordination and before I was prepared for the ministry, I was the leader of this church, being the founder of it. I was responsible for it. My wife and I were arrested several times, beaten, and hauled before Nazi judges. The Nazi terror was great, but only a taste of what was to come under the Communists.
My son, Mihai, had to assume a non-Jewish name to prevent his death. But these Nazi times had one great advantage. They taught us that physical beatings could be endured, and that the human spirit with God’s help can survive horrible tortures. They taught us the technique of secret Christian work, which was a preparation
for a far worse ordeal to come—an ordeal that was just before us.
