Behind bars, and subject to all manner of torture and humiliation, Krčméry kept himself sane and hopeful through cultivating and practicing his faith in a disciplined way and by evangelizing others.
In his memoir, This Saved Us, Krčméry recalls that after repeated beatings, torture, and interrogations, he realized that the only way he would make it through the ordeal ahead was to rely entirely on faith, not reason. He says he decided to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea.”
In my case, it truly was to plunge into physical and spiritual uncertainty, an abyss, where only faith in God could guarantee safety. Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the most powerful of foundations.
The more I depended on faith, the stronger I became.1
His personal routine included memorizing passages from a New Testament a new prisoner had smuggled into the jail. The Scripture Krčméry had already learned before the persecution started turned out to be a powerful aid behind bars.
“Memorizing texts from the New Testament proved to be an excellent preparation for critical times and imprisonment,” he writes. “The most beautiful and important texts which mankind has from God contain a priceless treasure which ‘moth and decay cannot destroy, and thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6:19).”
Committing Scripture to memory formed a strong basis for prison life, the doctor found.
“Indeed, as one’s spiritual life intensifies, things become clearer and the essence of God is more easily understood,” he writes. “Sometimes one word, or a single sentence from Scripture, is enough to fill a person with a special light. An insight or new meaning is revealed and penetrates one’s inner being and remains there for weeks or months at a time.”2
Krčméry structured his days and weeks to pray the Catholic mass, and sometimes the Orthodox Divine Liturgy. He interceded for specific people and groups of people, including his captors. This was a way of ordering the oppressive expanse of time, especially during periods of solitary confinement. Krčméry and his fellow prisoners were astonished, repeatedly, that beatings and interrogations were easier to endure than seemingly ceaseless periods of waiting.
The prisoner did periods of deep, sustained meditation, in which he thought deeply about his own life and his own sins, and he embraced a spirit of repentance. At one point, Krčméry wondered if he was wasting his time and increasing his emotional and psychological burden by sticking to these daylong spiritual exercises.
“I attempted to live a few days entirely without a program, but it did not work,” he remembers. “When I thought that I would only vegetate for the whole day, and just rest, that is when there were the most crises.”
Along with other prisoners, Krčméry would sing hymns, and would pray litanies for everyday needs, including for a spirit of humility and willingness to endure all for the sake of Christ. This brotherhood was an integral part of the spirituality of Christian resistance. Father Kolaković had taught the Family the virtue of reaching across church lines to establish brotherhood with other Christians. Captivity and torture turned this into a practical reality.
“In prison, nobody recognized any confessional differences,” writes Krčméry.
This same principle echoes in the testimony of the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand and other former captives of the communists. It is not a false ecumenism that claims all religions are essentially the same. It is rather a mutual recognition that within the context of persecution, embracing Jan Patočka’s “solidarity of the shattered” becomes vital to spiritual survival.
Silvester Krčméry left prison in 1964. He spent the next twenty-five years continuing his work for the anti-communist resistance. Along with other veterans of the underground church, he was a principal organizer of the 1988 Candle Demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. It was the first mass protest in Czechoslovakia in almost two decades, and served as a catalyst to the 1989 Velvet Revolution that restored freedom and democracy.
The Power of the Powerless Church
Patrick Parkinson is an Evangelical Christian and dean of one of Australia’s top law schools. He lived in Bratislava as a student in the early 1980s, and witnessed the spiritual power of the underground church firsthand. In a world of despair, these believers provided something rare and precious: real hope, the living out of which risked their lives and freedom.
“The church in those times offered people an alternative worldview,” Professor Parkinson tells me. “My young Catholic friends in the university, in particular, demonstrated great courage and faith. Their core instruction was to read the Bible every day and to pray every day at nine p.m. for the suffering church. They risked much to meet in small Bible study and prayer groups and security was very tight, but God protected them in wonderful ways.”
Nearly four decades later, Parkinson looks to the young Slovak Christians of his youth for hope in our own dark and difficult days. “There was a hunger for God when I was there, which I attributed in no small part to the enormous disillusionment with communism,” he says. “Disillusionment with materialism may take another couple of generations.”
When it comes, Christians who proclaimed with their words and deeds a real alternative to hedonistic materialism will be beacons guiding the lost and tempest-tossed.
Father Dmitry Dudko, who died in 2004, was a Russian Orthodox priest who, with astonishing courage, stood up to Soviet authorities for the sake of the Gospel. In the early 1970s, Father Dmitry became one of the best-known dissident Christians in the USSR. Before ordination, he spent eight years in the gulag for having written a poem
