IN GOD’S UNDERGROUND (Communist persecution)

 Richard Wurmbrand

 W.H.Allen 1968

 Medium 8to, 254 pages

 Richard Wurmbrand, playboy turned preacher, was held in Communist prisons for 14 years. His jailers tried to force him to confess that he was part of an imperialist spy network. Rather than lend himself to a Mindszenty-type-trial, he determined to kill himself if he felt his resistance going. Bit in spite of beatings, torture, and drugging, his spirit did not break.

 For almost 3 years Wurbrand was kept in a room 3 paces by 3, 35 feet underground, with only a tube for air. He did not know if it was night or day, or even what year it was. But, alone, in silence, he came close to the things of the spirit. ‘Often I felt such overwhelming joy’, he writes, ‘that I thought I would burst if I gave expression to it.’ So he danced at night in his lonely cell. Then he learnt to convert others by tapping messages on the walls, and heard confessions from unseen prisoners.

 For two years he was a patient in the ‘death room’ – so called because no other man had left it alive. Here, too, he found his parish. An unforgettable gallery of thieves, murderers, saints and sinners shared his cell ‘until each in turn passed through the gap of death’.

 The dust jacket has some minor shelf wear and rubs and small chip at the top of the spine, together with a 2cm split. The book is clean, tightly bound and in very good condition.

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