Richard Wurmbrand

Richard Wurmbrand (March 24, 1909 – February 17, 2001) was a Romanian Lutheran minister, evangelist, and writer of Jewish heritage who founded the international ministry Voice of the Martyrs (originally Jesus to the Communist World, 1967). Born in Bucharest to a Jewish family, he was educated as a young adult in Marxist atheism, married Sabina Oster (also Romanian Jewish), and was converted to Christianity in 1938 through a German carpenter Christian Wölfkes in a small village. After Communist takeover of Romania (1947), he and Sabina ministered in the Romanian underground church and to occupying Soviet soldiers. Wurmbrand was arrested in 1948 and imprisoned for fourteen years in all, first from 1948 to 1956 and then from 1959 to 1964, including three years of solitary confinement in a windowless cell. The prison experience included substantial torture; his body bore eighteen wounds from cigarette burns and other torture, which he showed under oath to the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on May 6, 1966. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit; he and Sabina relocated to the United States and founded the international ministry that became Voice of the Martyrs. Tortured for Christ (1967) and In God's Underground (1968, with Sabina) are the foundational texts. He testified before the US Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in May 1966 — exposing his back to demonstrate the torture wounds.