I Found God in Soviet Russia by John H. Noble

Author:John H. Noble [Noble, John H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Fascism & Totalitarianism, Political Ideologies, Political Science, World, History, Russian & Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781839741050
Google: 0_PCDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 2657474
Publisher: Zondervan Pub. House
Published: 1959-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XII — The Miracle of the Nuns

“VKOVO ti verisch?”

Several Ukrainians who shared the bunks at my end of the barracks clustered around and asked me this question. I had no idea what they were saying, for I knew neither Ukrainian nor Russian. One of them then took a scrap of paper and drew two symbols on it, a cross and a Buddha. I pointed to the cross and they murmured and nodded, obviously pleased, and one of the men made the sign of the Cross. This was my first communication with my fellow prisoners, and their very first question had brought us the common bond that transcends race or nationality, the Cross of Christ.

Alone as I was there in Vorkuta, utterly forlorn, I had been kneeling beside my space on the bunk shelf each night to offer up a prayer to God. The other men, observing this, had wanted to know to Whom I prayed. Now they knew that it was to the same One in Whom they believed.

The words of Our Lord (Matt. 19-20), “Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” came to have a new meaning to me here in Vorkuta as I realized deeply the need for a church, for some visible unit of belief and fellowship no matter how small. Though I had prayed fervently to God every night, I could feel my mind as well as my body slipping downward and I realized that unless I could share my prayers and thoughts with someone else, I would surely go mad.

Although there were many Germans at Vorkuta and, as I later learned, some other Americans, it was the practice of the MVD to break up ethnic and national groups among the incoming prisoners; that was why I had been billeted with a number of Ukrainians and Lithuanians. From the first, I was impressed by their spirit of friendliness and helpfulness toward a newcomer. They did their best to explain things to me by sign language. The first man with whom I was really able to talk was an outstanding rabbi, one of the many clergymen. Rabbi Simon Dickmann’s name I want to record for all because it is high time the Soviet authorities be forced to admit that they have been holding him prisoner since his “disappearance” in Moscow more than a decade ago. After enduring terrible persecution at the hands of the Nazis dining World War II, the rabbi managed to make his escape to Palestine. There, because of his knowledge of Polish and Russian, a Jewish relief agency sent him to Moscow to help the Jewish refugees who had fled eastward from Nazism, and to guide them on their way to their new homeland, Israel. A few months after Rabbi Dickmann’s arrival in Moscow, the Soviet government embarked on a ruthless persecution of its Jewish minority and began to systematically liquidate all who advocated Zionism. This persecution was apparently based on the conviction that anyone who wanted to leave the workers’ paradise and emigrate to some other country must be a capitalist sympathizer or a subversive agent.

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