Love Your Enemy

Voice of the Martyrs Newsletter. August 2006, pp 11 “A Torturer Repents,” by Richard Wurmbrand from his book “If Prison Walls Could Speak.”

I don’t have much to tell you all the beauties of the underground church. I should perhaps tell you just one episode which I have lived. We were in a prison cell, some 39 or 40 prisoners. The door was unlocked and the guards pushed in a new prisoner. He was dirty like we were. We had not washed ourselves in three years. So he was dirty, and we were dirty. He was shorn and had the striped uniform of a prisoner. In the half darkness of the cell, we did not recognize him, but at a certain moment, one of us exclaimed, “This is Captain Popescu, I recognize him!

Captain Popescu had been one of the worst tortures of Christians. He had beaten and tortured even some of us who were in the same cell with him. We wondered how he had become a prisoner of the communists and how he had been put in a prison cell reserved for Christians. So we surrounded him and asked him his story.

With tears in his eyes, he told us that as he sat in his office, a few months earlier a soldier on duty knocked at the door and said, “Outside is a boy of 12 or 13 who has a flower for your wife.” The captain scratched his head. He did not remember that it was his wife’s birthday, but in any case, he allowed the boy to enter. The boy entered with the flower in his hand, very shy, but very decided, and said: “Comrade Captain, you are the one who has put my father and mother in prison. Today is my mother’s birthday. I have the habit every year on this day, out of my little pocket money, to buy a flower for her. Because of you, I have no mother to gladden today. But my mother is a Christian, and she taught me since I was a little child to love my enemies and to reward evil with good. I thought to give joy to the mother of your children. Please take this flower to your wife and tell her about my love and about the love of Christ.”

It was too much even for a communist torturer. He was also a creature of God. He also has been enlightened with the light which enlightens every man who comes into this world. He embraced this child. He could no longer beat any more. He could not torture anymore. He was no longer useful as an officer of the communist secret police. He came to suffer together with the children of God and was happy of this new state.