[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7IxhzZTpFE&w=525&h=300]

Sandro Magister has the incredible story of Father Tertulian Ioan Langa, a Greek Catholic priest (d. 2013) who survived torture in Romanian communist prisons for his faith. Excerpt:

I remember Holy Thursday of 1948. For two weeks, every day, they had beaten me with a rod on the soles of my feet, through my shoes: it seemed that lightning coursed through my spine and exploded in my brain. But they didn’t ask me any questions. They were getting me ready, using the rod to soften me up for the interrogation. I was bound hand and foot and hung upside down, and my jailers stuffed into my mouth a sock that had already been long employed in the shoes and the mouths of other beneficiaries of socialist humanism. The sock had become the noise-reducer that prevented the sound from passing beyond the place of interrogation. But it was practically impossible to emit a single moan. Moreover, I had frozen psychologically: I was no longer capable of crying out or moving. My torturers interpreted this behavior as fanaticism on my part. And they continued with increasing fury, taking turns in torturing me. Night after night, day after day. They didn’t ask me anything, because they weren’t interested in answers, but in annihilating a person, something that was delayed in coming. And as the effort to annihilate my will and overshadow my mind was prolonged, so was the torture indefinitely prolonged. The battered shoes fell from my feet, piece by piece.

That Holy Thursday night, in a nearby church, they were celebrating the liturgical office, accompanied by bells that wept as if frightened. I started. Jesus must have heard my suffocated cry when, how I don’t know, I howled from within that hell: “Jesus! Jesus!” Coming out through the sock, my cry was incomprehensible to the jailers. As it was the first sound they had heard from me, they said they were satisfied, sure of having broken me. They dragged me on a blanket to the cell, where I fainted. When I awoke, the inquisitor was standing before me with a ream of paper in his hand. “You’ve been stubborn, criminal, but you’re not getting out of here until you’ve brought out everything you’re hiding inside. You have five hundred sheets of paper. Write about everything in your life: everything about your mother, your father, your sisters, brothers, in-laws, relatives, friends, acquaintances, bishops, priests, religious, politicians, professors, neighbors, and criminals like you. Don´t stop until you’ve finished the paper.” But I didn’t write anything. Not out of some kind of fanaticism, but because I didn’t have the strength: even my mind seemed empty.

More:

As a subject devoid of value and interest to the interrogators, I was transferred to the prison twenty-five feet beneath the marshy ground of Jilava, constructed for the defense of the capital but unusable on account of serious water damage. Nothing survived there except for man, the greatest treasure of historical materialism. In the cells of Jilava, the poor men were packed like sardines – not in oil, but in their own juices, made of sweat, urine, and the water that seeped in, which trickled ceaselessly down the walls. The space was utilized in the most scientific way possible: a patch of six feet by one foot for each person, lying on his side on the ground. The oldest lay on wooden tables, without sheets or blankets. Their thigh bones and the outside of their knees and calves lay along the wood. We lay on the edges of our bones in order to occupy minimal space. Our hands could rest only upon the ankle or shoulder of a neighbor. We couldn’t endure this for more than half an hour; then everyone, at a command, turned onto the other side, because this would have been impossible to do separately. The stack of bodies arranged this way was in two levels, as in bunk beds. But beneath this there was a third level, where the detainees lay upon the bare cement. On the cement, the condensed vapor of the breath of sixty men, together with the water that seeped in and the urine that seeped out of the latrine, formed a viscous mixture in which the unfortunate basted. At the center of the cell-tomb was enthroned a metal container holding about fifteen to twenty gallons, for the urine and feces of sixty men. It had no cover, and the smell and the liquid flowed from it abundantly. To reach it, one had to pass through the “filter,” a severe inspection applied to the bare skin, an inspection during which the entire body and all of its orifices were examined.

They scraped our mouths, the area under our tongues, and our gums with a wooden baton, in case we criminals had hidden something there. The same baton penetrated nostrils, ears, anus, beneath the testicles; always the same baton, rigorously the same for all, as a sign of egalitarianism. The windows of Jilava were made not to give light, but to obstruct it, as they were all completely sealed by wooden planks fastened with nails. The lack of air was such that in order to breathe we went to the door in shifts, three at a time, belly up, with our mouths against the gap beneath the door, a position in which we counted sixty breaths, after which the other inmates would come to recover from fainting and from the lack of oxygen.

Thus we contributed, in our way, to the construction of the most humane system in the world. Did Churchill and Roosevelt know these things when, with a stroke of the pen at Tehran’s shameful table, they established that we Romanians should be ground by the jaws of the red Moloch of the East, that we should be made the cord to secure their comfort? And could the Holy See have had any idea of this?

Read it all. 

This really happened, not in medieval times, but within living memory. The Orthodox priest Father Gheorghe Calciu suffered in the same way, as did the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand. Communists hated Christianity, and were determined to exterminate Christians.