Perusing the library at my parents’ church, I came across this fifty-year-old memoir of a Bulgarian pastor who was kidnapped, jailed, and tortured by the Communists for 13 years under trumped-up charges of espionage. While such books might have been a dime a dozen back in the age of the Iron Curtain, they’re harder to find today, and still harder to believe. What dearth of humanity existed then! What beastly behavior from man against his fellow man! How sad to know that we still hear inklings of the same in pockets around the world today.

The Story

Haralan Popov was a young father when the police stole him from his home. He writes at length about his initial six-months of torture in “the White House”, involving most specifically a starvation diet and being forced to stand eight inches from a shiny white wall with eyes open for days at a time, all while being harassed by three investigators tag-teaming in eight-hour shifts. A man can only take so much it seams, and finally his will was broken. He writes:

Brainwashing calls for alternating between good and bad treatment. Destroying a person’s will is simpler—it requires only brutal, unrelenting beatings, starvation and torture building up to a rising peak and crescendo of horror where a person no longer has a will of his own. (27)

Along with every other pastor but one, he signed a confession, describing for them all that their broken selves had become nothing more than tape recorders repeating whatever the officials wanted them to say. During a highly publicized trial against leaders of the church in Bulgaria, a trial rife with false testimony, Papov was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He ended up serving 13 years and 2 months in some of the most despicable situations imaginable.

The Pains of Torture

The communists in his memoir show great genius in devising new forms of torture, humiliation, and discomfort. Sometimes they chased the skeletal prisoners on horseback with whips the four miles to their grueling work sites. Once, they put a group of misbehaving prisoners on a raft in the middle of a frozen river for two weeks straight, and many of them suffered frostbite and subsequent amputations. During one of his final episodes at the island prison camp, he and a hundred other prisoners were locked in a wooden box buried in the ground with only a trap door for ventilation.

The images and pains he describes are cringe-worthy, yet through it all he speaks of God’s faithfulness and God’s plan in never allowing him to simply drift off to death—no matter how much he craved it. The turning point for Papov came when he discovered that his wife and two children had escaped Bulgaria for his wife’s native Sweden. He writes:

I was no longer afraid of the communists. They had me, but they could not touch my family! Ruth, Paul, and Rhoda were free. With this great, crushing load off my shoulders, I determined to enlarge my ministry as prison pastor. What could they do to me? My wife and children were free. They could torture me, but they couldn’t touch my one really vulnerable spot—my wife and children! (71)

His Ministry During and After

With them gone, he began a more intentional ministry to his fellow-prisoners, keeping it secret even in prison because of the ever-present “informers”. He had memorized 47 chapters of the Bible and used these to teach the new converts about the doctrines of Christ. He even had a ministry during solitary confinement of tapping the Gospel out with a tin cup in “prison Morse code.”

Popov was eventually released from prison, where he found himself quite destitute, without his family and without a home. But he roomed in the attic of a faithful grandmother, served in churches throughout Sofia Bulgaria, and eventually made his way to Sweden, not only to be with his wife and children again, but to inform the sleeping Church in the West of the atrocities, needs, and vibrant faith of the underground churches behind the Iron Curtain. Of suffering, he writes:

Suffering was a fire our churches had to undergo so that all that was hay and stubble would be burned up, leaving the pure gold shining more brightly than ever. In the process the ‘structure’ of the church would be destroyed or subverted, but there would remain a true, living Church, the Body of Christ, the Suffering Church. (21)

Communism’s Hold

Not surprisingly, Popov reflects much upon communism and the way it took hold of and strangled his home country. Among many musings throughout the book, these in particular stuck out to me:

Communism…is a ‘religion’ of militant atheism. The inability to destroy faith in God is communism’s ‘Achilles heel’. (3)

The Communists when out of power are often congenial, cooperative and mild. But let them gain power and you will see what they are really like! (24)

The Nazis were cruel, but the communists were cruel and satanically clever. That is the only real difference between the Nazis and communists in practice. (25)

Near the gate [of the prison yard] we saw a sign, loosely translated: ‘Man is something to be proud of’—a quotation from Maxim Gorki….When we looked behind us [after entering the prison yard] we saw another quotation by Maxim Gorki: ‘If the enemy doesn’t surrender, he must be annihilated.’ I thought about the contradiction in the two phrases, reflecting the division in the mind of the writer. By this, one can understand the chasm between communism in theory and communism in practice. The first quotation showed communist theory in its effort to create an earthly paradise. The second phrase showed the harsh reality. On the one hand, man is something to be proud of; on the other, he is the enemy who must be annihilated. (89)

In the final pages of his book, Popov reprimands the Western Church for oftentimes failing to pray for the persecuted Church, and I imagine that he would continue that same cry even today, because the issue hasn’t improved. With groups like Voice of the Martyrs and The Joshua Project, Western Churches can at least get a glimpse into areas where the Gospel of Jesus Christ is either officially illegal or otherwise forbidden. But still, by and large, we fail to pray as we ought; we take for granted all the freedoms we have; we don’t thirst for the Word as does a person who’s been denied it.

Conclusion

Books like this are inspiring, not only in giving one a healthy fear of religious oppression, but also for giving us a recharge in recognizing our need to pray. If you can ever find a copy of this book, I highly recommend it.

©2019 E.T.