God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

  Wilhelm met me at the door and without hesitation invited me in. We sat around Mar’s porcelain kitchen table drinking coffee while I explained my mission behind the Curtain.

  “Well, I’m glad you’ve come,” said Wilhelm. He stopped to cough, a deep dry cough that racked his whole frame. “We need all the encouragement we can find.”

  “Do you need Bibles, for instance?” I asked him. “I have some German Bibles with me.”

  “Oh, we have plenty of Bibles.”

  I had heard this before, and waited for the slow admission that in fact there were very few Bibles. But Mar took me into the little study, and I could have thought I was home. There were a dozen Bibles on the shelves. I picked one up and looked at the East German imprint. “Printed in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik.”

  “Let me tell you about some other freedoms,” said Wilhelm. “We have seminaries here that do not turn out politicians—they turn out Christians. We have evangelical campaigns that draw thousands. We have a move within the Lutheran Church that is as forceful, I would venture, as anything you can find in Holland.”

  “But—you said you needed encouragement.”

  Suddenly Wilhelm’s fists clenched. I saw the knuckles go white.

  “We’re fighting one of the most important battles in Europe. Here in Germany the Communists are trying out a new kind of ‘persuasion,’ in my mind far more dangerous than outright persecution. Could you come with me to today’s meeting of our synod? You’ll see for yourself what I’m talking about.”

  I suggested that he come with me in my car, and Mar smiled at me gratefully. “It’s that awful motorbike,” she said. “That’s what makes him cough. Thousands of kilometers in all kinds of weather. And the doctor told him two years ago to stay out of drafts!”

  Wilhelm patted her hand. “Mar worries,” he told me apologetically. “But if you want to reach young people all over the country, what can you do?”

  In the car, he went back to his subject. “It would be we Germans who caught on first,” Wilhelm said. “You can’t use strong-arm tactics against the Church without strengthening it. It’s always been that way. Under persecution a man looks at his faith to see if it’s worth fighting for, and this is a scrutiny Christianity can always withstand. The real danger comes with an indirect attack, where a person is lured away from the Church before he has a chance to become strong. Keep this in mind while you listen today.”

  This synod meeting had been called to consider the problem that they called the counterfeit church. Pastor after pastor got up and read off statistics that at first I did not understand. “Welcoming Service, 35 percent. Youth Consecration, 55 percent. Marriage, 45 percent. Funeral, 50 percent.”

  But as Wilhelm whispered the explanation of these figures, the enormity of the plan began to emerge. Realizing that it was getting nowhere in its frontal attack against the Church, the regime had taken a new direction. For God and the religious instinct, it was attempting to substitute the State, and the emotion of patriotism. Using the ancient wisdom of the Church, it was offering state ceremonies in frank imitation of Christian rites.

  There was, for example, an alternative to Baptism that went under the attractive name of Welcoming Service. At the time that a baby’s name was officially registered, relatives and friends were invited to a celebration. The infant was brought forward by the parents to an official of the government, who received him with due ceremony as a new member of the state. And there was the state Marriage Service. On the continent it is customary to have two marriages, a legal one performed by a government official and a sacramental one held in a church. The new regime was taking both roles. After the legal marriage the state was offering a second service, free of charge, to which all were invited and at which there were flowers and food and a solemn ceremony welcoming the couple into the socialist society in the expectation that it would be happy and fruitful.

  The same was true of the Funeral Service. The state performed a simple, dignified ceremony free of charge, and again the church service was emulated. A eulogy was said, praising this valiant soldier of the People’s Democracy for his part in the war for human freedom.

  And of course most blatantly competitive of all was the Youth Consecration, the Jugend Weihe, about which I had learned from Henrietta. This had proved especially effective because it was directed at people at an age when acceptance was supremely important. At this susceptible time in his life the youngster was told to make up his mind which to follow: his country or his church. There was intense pressure on him to follow his classmates up the aisle and receive the blessing of the state.

  On and on the statistics went, “Jugend Weihe, 70 percent. Burial, 30 percent.” The true significance of these figures did not hit me until Wilhelm explained that they represented church parishioners, and that this was the percent who had taken the state rites instead of, not in addition to, the religious ceremony.

  “At first,” Wilhelm told me, “the churches took a noncompromise line against the state services. If a child participated in the Youth Consecration, he could not receive the sacrament of confirmation.”

  This of course put the youngster in a terrible position, and it was precisely this tension that the regime looked for. The first year of the government’s experiment there was a drop of 40 percent in confirmations. The next year the figure was 50 percent, and each year since, it had gotten worse. Bit by bit, many of the liturgical Protestant churches were easing their stand, saying that one year after participating in the Jugend Weihe a child could receive the Church’s sacrament. The Roman Catholics, however, had not yet yielded, and for this they had the admiration of the most ardent Protestants.

  “It’s an open fight for allegiance,” said Wilhelm, “and the churches are losing. It’s hard to say no when your classmates are saying yes.”

  The churches’ defense against this clever attack had been to retreat and withdraw, Wilhelm told me. Instead of going out on the offensive, they were pulling further and further into an attitude of private piety and isolation.

  “Which is why I am so glad you have come to be with us,” he said. “You can help us remember that the Church is larger than any one nation or any one political scene. We have forgotten that with God on our side we shall conquer.”

  He was about to leave, he said, on his semimonthly tour of youth groups. He invited me to join him. “I’d like your company. And”—with a smile—“Mar will like that automobile.”

  And so for nearly two weeks I traveled with him throughout southern East Germany preaching with an amazing freedom to churches that had plenty of Bibles, plenty of literature, wide open evangelical meetings—and that were demoralized beyond any churches I had yet met behind the Curtain.

  Basically, during those twelve days, I preached just one sermon over and over in a hundred different versions. I urged the German Christians to become missionaries; because it has been my experience that a missionary church is an alive church.

  At the first church where I made this suggestion the pastor stood up and said heatedly, “Brother Andrew, it’s easy enough for you to speak about missionary work, because you can travel anywhere you want. But what about us here in East Germany? We can’t even leave the country.”

  “Wait!” I said. “Think about what you have just said. I must take a long and costly trip to get to East Europe. But you’re already here! How many Russian soldiers are there in your country now? Half a million, I believe. Think of that! How many unconverted fellow Germans are there in these hills? Don’t complain to yourselves that you can’t go to the mission field! Thank God for bringing the mission field to you!”

  And then I told them the biblical story of a man doing precisely what I was urging them to do.

  I told them about the time Paul was in prison in Rome chained between two soldiers. “Now there were two possibilities,” I said. “Either he could sit there and complain that he could not get out, or he could make use of the situation. Well, Paul began to thank God
that he had a captive audience. He began to preach the Gospel. After a while the guard was changed; two more soldiers came in. Paul thanked God for the two new ones and began again. And the result was that he made these men Christians. He founded a church right there in Caesar’s household. And this, I feel, is the incomparable mission of Christians behind the Curtain.”

  Brother Andrew’s boyhood home in Witte, Netherlands

  Andrew (center) in the uniform of the Dutch Army in 1947

  Andrew (far right) recovers from his injury at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Semarang in 1949.

  Government offices in Warsaw in 1955. Picture was taken by Andrew with Uncle Hoppy’s camera on his trip to the world youth congress.

  Women going to market early in the morning outside Warsaw—one of the scenes Brother Andrew witnessed on his trips into Eastern Europe

  A boy announces the arrival of a Dutch team to a refugee camp in Austria in 1958.

  Brother Andrew waits to speak at a church in Eastern Europe in the 1950s.

  Visiting with Hungarian believers in the early 1960s

  Corrie ten Boom and Brother Andrew at a meeting in Holland in 1969

  At the Great Wall of China in 1965, just before the start of the Great Cultural Revolution

  Just a few of the Bibles in Andrew’s Bible collection

  Project Pearl: loading one million Bibles onto a barge for delivery to China in 1981

  With Bishara Awad in front of Bethlehem Bible College

  Andrew meets with Abu Nassar, one of the leaders of Hamas in Gaza.

  Meeting with Ayatollah Fadlallah in Beirut, 2003

  Brother Andrew speaks at the national Open Doors Day in Netherlands, 2005.

  13

  To the Rim of the Inner Circle

  Back in West Berlin I hurried from camp to camp, looking for Corry. When I finally found her, conducting lice inspections on the heads of a row of five- and six-year-olds, I was appalled at the change that had come over her in less than three weeks. She had lost weight, her skin had a strange yellowish pallor, and there were circles under her eyes.

  I accused myself all over again for having brought her there, and above all for having left her alone. One of the things I had wanted to try, from Berlin, was to take a precious cargo of Bibles into Yugoslavia, to the church in Belgrade, among others, that had only seven among its whole membership. I knew from my previous experience that their consulate in Berlin was the place to apply for the visa, rather than The Hague.

  Now, as I looked at my young wife’s lined face and haunted eyes, I realized that a trip to Yugoslavia would serve a double purpose. What better place to forget the horrors of the camps than that beautiful land—loveliest I had seen. And so I took both our passports to the Yugoslav consulate and spent the rest of the day buying Bibles.

  Corry gave me an argument again. There was so much to do in the camps, she could do nothing in Yugoslavia—the same objections as before. But this time I overruled her on the grounds of her own health, and we set out for the first time together behind the Iron Curtain.

  If it hadn’t been for Corry’s illness, which seemed to get worse instead of better, that first week of the trip would have been perfect. This time the border guard scarcely glanced at our luggage. They spotted us for newlyweds and suggested ocean resorts to visit and scenic routes to take. For future smuggling operations I filed away this new bit of knowledge: A man and woman made a natural traveling team and aroused far less suspicion than a man traveling alone.

  Jamil and Nikola greeted us with tears of joy in their eyes. When we brought the new Bibles out in church after church, the congregations could scarcely believe their eyes. And then everyone had to meet Corry; the women kissed her, the men thumped me on the back.

  For six days, things couldn’t have gone better. With Nikola interpreting for me again—in spite of the fine and warning he had incurred for his earlier help—I shared with Yugoslavian churches the vision that had come to me in East Germany. A vision of Iron Curtain churches not in retreat but on the advance.

  And then on the evening of the seventh day, while we were eating dinner in the house of friends in a town near Sawaweho, the police came. It happened so suddenly that for a moment I didn’t realize for whom they had come. We were seated around the kitchen table eating rice and lamb—all except Corry who didn’t feel well and had gone to lie down—when there was a knock on the door, and in walked two gray-uniformed police.

  “You come with us,” they said to me.

  “Come? Where?”

  “Do not talk. Do not finish your meal. Just come.”

  I looked at my friends who were sitting, forks raised, mouths open in fear. Corry appeared in the doorway, pale and disheveled.

  “She is with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her too.”

  It was soon apparent that the police knew all about my former trip to Yugoslavia. They were courteous enough, but they informed us that we would have to leave the country immediately. My visa had been canceled. There was no redress. Would I please hand over my passport then and there.

  Reluctantly, because I did not want a bad stamp in my passport that other consulates would question, I turned over my papers. The officers looked at them carefully, cross-checked them with their own orders, and then took out an enormous red stamp, which they inked well and slammed down across the face of my visa. I was persona non grata in Yugoslavia.

  Already at a low ebb physically, Corry was shaken by the arrest. “Andy, I was scared stiff!” she kept saying as we drove across Austria toward Germany. “And those men were being nice about it!”

  We intended to stop in Berlin only long enough to pick up two passengers, refugees whom we were sponsoring in Holland. My chief thought was to get Corry home and to a doctor. Something was wrong, something more than just fatigue and strain. More and more frequently I had to stop the car and let her get out to stretch full length on the grass until the retching sickness passed.

  But when we reached Berlin, there was a surprise waiting for us. Seeing that the Yugoslav consulate there was more lenient than the one in Holland, I had made the rounds of the Berlin offices of every other country I wanted to visit. And now on our return I found not one but two letters waiting at the hostel. Both Bulgaria and Rumania had considered my application and were pleased to tell me that I had only to appear at their Berlin headquarters to have my travel documents validated.

  Bulgaria and Rumania! According to everything, two of the countries where persecution of the Church was most intense. At last, the Inner Circle! Surely God’s hand was on the door, ready to throw it wide.

  And just as surely, Corry needed her own home and her own bed. In addition, there was the matter of that incriminating stamp in my passport. Certainly the other governments would want to know why I had been expelled from Yugoslavia.

  So instead of going to the consulates, we went home to Witte. Corry went to bed almost at once, and I called the doctor. He was with her for a long time while I sat miserably on the ladder outside.

  At last he emerged, lowering himself gingerly rung by rung. “Your wife is fine,” he told me when he had reached solid ground. “I’ve given her some pills for the nausea, and she should come in to see me next month.”

  “But what’s the matter with her?” I asked anxiously.

  “Matter!” At last the man perceived that I did not understand. In a formal little gesture he swept his hat from his head and held out his hand. “Congratulations. You’re going to be a father.”

  “But for heaven’s sake,” he added, putting his hat back on his head, “stop dragging that poor girl all over Europe and let her get some rest.”

  “And another thing,” he said, pausing at the little bridge, “get rid of those stacks of clothing up there! She’s going to be a mother, not a mountain climber.”

  It was November when we returned from Berlin and Yugoslavia, and the baby was due in June. By January, Corry was feeling so well that I began to think ser
iously again about that trip into the Inner Circle—by myself, of course, under the circumstances, leaving Corry under the watchful eye of Geltje. Allowing three or four weeks in each of the two countries, I would be back in plenty of time for the baby’s birth.

  But there was still that matter of the passport. What could I do about the bad page? Tear it out? That was impossible, since all the pages were numbered. Throw the whole thing away, pretend I had lost it, and file a claim for a new one? But that was not the Royal Way; the King’s servants didn’t have to stoop.

  I went to The Hague, to the office of passport control, and showed the reviewing officer my problem. He was very understanding. “I sympathize with you,” he said, “but there’s nothing we can do.”

  “You see,” I said, “I’m a missionary. I want to go to these countries to contact the Christians there.”

  He considered this for a moment. Then he shook his head. “We can’t even give you hints about how to get a new passport quickly. Such as, for instance, doing a lot of travel to nearby countries and always insisting that they stamp your papers, so that your passport will fill up sooner. We couldn’t even give you hints like that, don’t you see? I’m very sorry.”

  Within a few weeks I had a new passport.

  Corry was reluctant to let me go. She still had not got over the shock of our arrest in Yugoslavia. But when the shipment of Bulgarian and Rumanian Bibles arrived from the British and Foreign Bible Society in London, she helped me stow them away in the car herself. “A bargain’s a bargain,” she said. “After all, I signed on as the wife of a missionary.”