Krčméry threw the accusation back in their faces. He said Jesus is not satisfied with mere churchgoing, but wants believers to live for Christ in all times and places. This is what Krčméry had learned studying with Father Kolaković, and this is what first brought him to the attention of the secret police.
“Do not be afraid and always act as you think Christ would act in your place and in a particular situation,” Father Kolaković had taught his followers. When the secret police arrested Krčméry, he laughed, because he understood that he was being given the gift of suffering for Jesus.
In prison, Krčméry was denied a Bible and found himself grateful that he had spent the past few years of freedom memorizing Scripture. Like other political prisoners, Krčméry endured repeated tortures. He had been trained to resist brainwashing. In the end, he relied on faith alone to guide his path. The more he surrendered in his weakness, the greater his spiritual strength.
The young doctor decided to be united in his suffering with Christ’s, and to offer his pain as a gift to God for the sake of other persecuted people. He believed that the Lord was allowing him to endure this trial for a reason—but he had to convince himself in the face of his agonies.
“Therefore I repeated again and again: ‘I am really God’s probe, God’s laboratory. I’m going through all this so I can help others, and the Church.”4
Krčméry decided that he had to be useful. He discovered that simple acts of solidarity with fellow sufferers, both given and received, mattered more than he could have imagined. In that communist prison, the biblical command to bear one another’s burdens became intensely real. “A brother who helped in hard times was closer in suffering than the closest relatives and friends, outside, often on a permanent basis,” he writes. This Catholic layman lived out the truth of the Orthodox priest John of Kronstadt’s advice to the widowed priest Alexei Mechev: to join his grief with the griefs of others, and he would find them easier to bear.
Torture, deprivation, isolation—all of those things could have destroyed Silvo Krčméry, and made him a hateful man, or at least a defeated one. But the transcript of his 1954 trial shows that it refined him, purified him, made him strong in the Lord. In his final defense statement, Krčméry defiantly proclaimed to the court:
God gave me everything I have and now that I face persecution because of Him, and am called on to profess my faith in Him, should I now pretend I don’t believe? Should I hide my faith? Should I deny Him?5
He taunted his communist persecutors, declaring, “We will not allow ourselves to be led to hate, to rebel, or even to complain. . . . That is where our strength and superiority lie.”
It would be ten years before Silvester Krčméry saw the outside of a prison. He spent the rest of his life evangelizing from his home in Bratislava and working with the sick, especially addicts. The man who said that refusing hatred was the strength of persecuted Christians did not seek vengeance, even after communism’s fall.
“Bless You, Prison”: Receive Suffering As a Gift
“Bless those who persecute you,” Jesus taught. Vengeance is easier to resist if you have that mind-set. In his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reveals how he and his fellow inmates were beaten, humiliated, deprived of liberty, made to live in filth and freezing temperatures and crawling with lice, and to endure many other grotesque manifestations of communism’s determination to create heaven on earth. That’s why nothing in that epochal book’s pages shocks more than these lines:
And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison! . . . Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”6
Solzhenitsyn’s audacious claim was that suffering had refined him, taught him to love. It was only there, out of the experience of intense suffering, that the prisoner began to understand the meaning of life and first began to sense the good inside himself.
To be clear, there is nothing in the Gospels that requires Christians to seek out suffering. The Word of God is not a prescription for masochism. But the life of Christ, as well as the Old Testament’s example of the prophets, compels believers to accept the impenetrable mystery that suffering, if rightly received, can be a gift.
Father Kirill Kaleda, the Russian Orthodox priest who pastors the church dedicated to the martyrs of the Bolshevik persecution, offers a prudent view on suffering in the life of a Christian.
“Taking up your cross and carrying it is always going to be uncomfortable. We can say clearly that this current ideology of comfort is anti-Christian in its very essence,” says Father Kirill. “But we should point out the fact that the church, not once, ever called its followers to look for suffering, and even made it clear that they are warned not to do that. But if a person finds himself in a situation where he’s suffering, then he should bear it with courage.”
Alexander Ogorodnikov, whom you met in earlier chapters, is one of the most famous dissidents of the late Soviet period. Born into a communist family, he was a leader in the Komsomol youth movement, his enthusiasm earning him notice from the KGB as a potential recruit. But he converted to Christianity in his twenties. His campaigning for religious liberty landed him a prison sentence in 1978. He was freed nine years later after US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher appealed to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on his behalf.
Ogorodnikov, now nearly seventy, is quiet and intense. His face is partially paralyzed as a result of the beatings he received in the gulag. It is one thing to read about the torture of Soviet prison camps in a book.
