Nicole Valery will not be well-known within the Church but her memoir of imprisonment in communist Romania deserves to be considered a classic of Christian writing. It is stuffed with the religion, hope and love that helped her to endure horrific suffering while detained without trial as a political prisoner.
Stories of murder and repression within the Far East could also be well-known to today’s Christians. But there have been once many more stories of harsh persecution – of the very worst kind – within the Eastern communist states before the repressive regimes collapsed within the late Eighties.
Valery was a author imprisoned in 1949 within the wake of the communist takeover of Romania. Her associations with rival political factions made her a goal of the brand new regime. She was to spend 4 years locked up without trial, and would endure at various times torture under interrogation, forced labour and solitary confinement.
Yet the title of her memoir gives a stark contrast to those indignities: “Prisoner rejoice” or “Benie sois tu, prison” (Blessed are you, prison) in the unique French. Although currently out of print, a Romanian movie based on her book is freely available on YouTube.
Valery’s memoir is startling for its passionate exhortations of the ability of religion to sustain an individual through horrific treatment. She writes of transcending her situation through the love of God. “When a soul has been tuned by suffering, meditation and prayer, it would find unexpected power to beat time and circumstances,” reads her work. “For such a soul, faith becomes ‘the substance of things hoped for’, and love a flame which warms, enlivens and enlightens.”
Valery had been taught religion as a baby but rejected it in early maturity and would dabble within the occult and look to politics as the reply to the world’s problems. However while she was still free, a friendship with Sabina Wurmbrand – wife of the better-known Romanian prisoner Richard, founding father of Voice of the Martyrs – would introduce her to the living faith that might be her support within the difficult years ahead. Wurmbrand, also often called Nicolai Ionescu, wrote “Tortured for Christ” and have become well-known within the Western church for advocating for the persecuted church.
Early in Valery’s time in prison, she created a “rule” to assist her devotion to Jesus. This included: that God is love, that He wouldn’t allow her to stray, that He has planned to spiritually bless her through this suffering, and that she must not pray to be released from prison, nor say “I can’t stand it anymore”.
Her extraordinary vows concluded: “I have to benefit from the time I spend here behind bars to vary spiritually, to be useful to others, to earn patience, the worth of sacrifice for one’s neighbour. I have to learn never to harbour the least vestige of hatred towards those that torture me.”
This was no easy task while enduring threats to skin her alive and various blasphemies. But her captors would declare her the “mad woman” due to her loving reactions: “right from the beginning I smiled at them, because searching through the peephole they saw my lips move, because because the questioning became more intense they often heard me sing under my breath and saw the radiant look on my face — all this at times when my exhaustion and my suffering were such that they may feel it themselves.
“I used to be never capable of tell them, that despite the pain in my body, my spirit was upheld by a way of serenity and joy. I never managed to allow them to know that I felt no hatred towards them, indeed that I used to be attempting to love them and that I used to be praying for them with love, at the same time as they were throwing buckets of water over me to bring me round after I passed out, or threatening to beat me after I couldn’t take one other step.”
After this era of brutal interrogation and solitary confinement, she was placed in a big prison with women from a wide selection of backgrounds, including prostitutes and non secular sisters. Soon they’d begin to grow in faith together, helped by the prospect discovery of a Bible, which they separated into 66 books and shared throughout the community, for personal devotion and collective acts of worship. “These hours of praise together did wonderful things for us, crowning the work that God’s Word had done because it sank into each of our minds,” she wrote. “It was a totally natural act, a necessity felt by a number of souls united together in a single faith and hope.”
Listening to the sad stories of the extraordinary prisoners’ lives would touch Valery and the opposite political detainees deeply. But sadly their time spent on prayer and worship would soon be restricted once they were sent in small groups to forced labour camps. Valery would slave to construct a canal while being fed meagre rations, and even needed to dig to unblock the sewage drainage of a pig farm – work so unpleasant it made some women vomit. But still Valery focused on spiritual matters and sought to like every one in every of the ladies round her and love them “wholeheartedly” regardless that she didn’t know them.
She wrote that as she loved them, she “suffered with them” they usually confided in her, regardless that it was difficult to bear their hurts and pains as well. Trying to hold their pain, though, gave her a greater understanding of the suffering and “unique love” of Christ, who suffered for all mankind.
Valery’s inspiring faith would influence other women throughout the imprisonment. Even during her time in solitary, she found a possibility to share the gospel. Bible verses she had memorised as a baby got here to her and strengthened her. She decided to jot down them on the partitions of the prison with a view to pass on that strength to those that would occupy her cell at a later date.
Towards the tip of her time in prison she was to find the effect these efforts had on only one woman, Eva, who said she was inspired to repent and switch to God by the words written on a cell wall. Valery recalled Eva’s words: “Using the words which got here to my lips and inspired by the lines I had found scrawled on the partitions, I spoke to God, and opened my heart to Him with all its corruption. I asked Him to forgive me, to guide me, to guard me.” The two became friends.
On her release, Valery would marry author Sergiu Grossu, a part of the Orthodox Church renewal movement Oastea Domnului (Army of the Lord), who was also imprisoned in 1959 just two years after their marriage. After being pardoned, they emigrated to France, where they ran a publishing house and Nicole wrote and published her memoir. She passed away in 1996.
Her story of spiritual growth is similar with that of the more famous victim of communism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who would himself come to faith after prison swept away his delusions concerning the Soviet regime and allowed childhood seeds of Christian faith to sprout. His work has been given more attention recently because it is usually discussed by famous Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. It was perhaps this quote from Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work, the Gulag Archipelago, that inspired the title of Valery’s book: “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I got here to appreciate that the thing of life will not be prosperity as we’re made to consider, however the maturity of the human soul.”
Valery spared the reader the small print of the torture she endured. In any case, she wrote, it was not this trauma that stayed along with her, however the presence of Jesus during her suffering: “That is why I’m attempting to retain in these lines only the facets which have remained unaltered, living, still as fresh inside me as once they happened, specifically the wonderful times I spent with Jesus, continually in His presence, continually aware of living with Him.
“The same applies to the unforgettable friendship, the sense of sisterhood which united all those of us who shared the identical convictions and the identical ideal. Such matters are written indelibly on my soul, and if I write them down, it’s in order that those that still have no idea that the happiness of a life given over totally to Jesus can have this same joy.”
Heather Tomlinson is a contract Christian author. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com or via X (twitter) @heathertomli
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