Excerpts :
Princess Marthe Bibesco
Ana Blandiana
Smaranda Braescu
Madelene “Madi” Cancicov
Nina Cassian
Elena Ceausescu
Ioana Celibidache
Queen Elisabeth of Romania
Princess Gregoire Ghica
Princess Ileana of Romania
Dora D’Istria
Monica Lovinescu
Ileana Malancioiu
Queen Marie of Romania
Dr. Agnes Kelly Murgoci
Mabel Nandris
Countess Anna de Noailles
Ana Novac
Oana Orlea
Ana Pauker
Marta Petreu
Elisabeta Rizea of Nucsoara
Sanda Stolojan
Leontina Vaduva
Anca Visdei
Sabina Wurmbrand
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Sabina Wurmbrand (Sabina Oster)
Missionary of the underground church,
Pastor’s wife, Political Prisoner, Exile, (1913, Romania
– 2000, California, USA)
"...I was marched to the guard-room and put into a carcer.
It was a narrow cupboard built into the wall in which you could
just stand. The iron door had a few holes to admit air... After
a few hours, my feet were burning. The blood in my temples beat
with slow, painful thuds. How many hours could they keep me
here?... Drops of water were falling from somewhere on the roof
of the box. It was a desolate sound. I counted them to make
time pass... I don’t know how long I did this, but at a
certain moment I simply began to cry aloud to avoid despair.
"One, two, three, four," I cried, and again, "One,
two, three, four..." After a time the words became inarticulate.
I didn’t know what I said. My mind had moved into rest.
It blacked out. Yet my spirit continued to say something to
God.” (“The pastor's wife”)
Biography:
Sabina Wurmbrand was born in a Jewish
family in Romania and became a Christian, at the age of 23,
in 1936, together with her husband Richard, who also converted.
During WWII the Wurmbrands were busy saving Jewish children
from ghettos, where several members of their family died.
Still once Communism came to power the Wurmbrands fell foul
of the atheistic system and both husband and wife were sent
to forced labour camps. One of the charges was their evangelism
in pressing bibles in the hands of the soldiers of the occupying
Societ Army in Romania. Sabina Wurmbrand herself was jailed
for three years in the 1951 pressed into slave labor digging
and carting dirt for the Danube-Black Sea canal, a Stalinist
pharaonic project intended to destroy political prisoners..
Held there for three years, she ate grass to stop starving.
After her release from forced labour camp , Wurmbrand was kept
under house arrest. She was offered a reprieve on condition
that she repudiated her husband and her religion, which she
refused. Both husband and wife were eventually released after
a strong lobby from the Protestant Church in Norway and forced
to emigrate, in 1966. First, the Wurmbrands, being jewish, they
naturally wanted to settle in Israel, but ironically there too
they were refused permission on religious grounds. They chose
instead the United States where the Wurmbrands jointly founded
the “Christian Mission to the Communist World’, later
to become the “Voice of Martyrs” (VM), whose HQ are
in Bartlesville Oklahoma. Like Oana Orlea (q.v.) Mrs Wurmbrand
wrote her prisons memoirs describing the abject conditions and
the deshumanisation of Romanian women in the labour camps. She
died in California soon after she had the joy of a last reunion
of her surviving women prisoners in Romania.
Bibliography:
Wurmbrand, Sabina, “The pastor's
wife”
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