He expected to be shot in the back at any moment, but it didn’t happen. The men came up behind him and encircled him again. Roughly pushing Ogorodnikov along, the men discussed what they were going to do with the body later on.“Do we torture him first?” one of them asked.“We’ll start when we get there,” said another.“Where do you want to shoot him?” asked a third. Ogorodnikov stumbled on a bit farther, and then someone shouted, “Kneel!”“I kneel only to God,” Ogorodnikov answered.The man discharged a few shots over his head, and he snarled, “We don’t want any new martyrs!”Suddenly, Ogorodnikov saw a side path and turned into it.…By morning, Tatiana’s apartment was surrounded by KGB agents on all sides. Nonetheless, Ogorodnikov left the building — with a couple of agents close on his tail. In an attempt to shake them off, he hurried to the inner courtyard of a block of flats. Panicking, he pushed his shoulder against a door and, luckily, it opened. He ran up the stairs to the highest floor, expecting to be arrested at any moment. Out of breath, he opened the small New Testament he had with him. His eyes fell on verse 14 of the second chapter of the First Epistle of John [1 John 2:14]: “I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.”A sense of peace suddenly fell over him. Ogorodnikov kissed the New Testament and returned it to his back pocket. The minutes ticked by, but there were no footsteps to be heard. He descended the stairs with caution, and once he got to the courtyard, there was no one to be seen. The agents had disappeared without a trace. He was free again — at least for now.
“All prisons [BBC - Siberian prisons; Gulag-Wikipedia] were overcrowded. Probably 4000 men were in prison, and pastors were found everywhere. I cannot describe how they all fared. … The hardest hour I experienced was not the rough treatment in prison, not the mean work we were forced to do, such as: the cleaning of the septic tanks (when typhus and other epidemics were rife), the driving of manure carts in the city, the thrusts and swear words, which I, like every other one of my comrades, got to taste in abundance, but the hardest thing was when, after the most shameless body inspection, the prison administration, consisting of nothing but depraved, wanted to take away my New Testament, which I had always been used to carrying in my skirt pocket. [like Ogorodnikov] It was especially valuable to me, since it had accompanied me to Siberia, since I had held many hundreds of Bible lessons from it. Now it was to be taken away from me, because the prison is a state building, and in a state building nothing religious, therefore no New Testament may be found, which in addition in its readers only produces the ‘known religious madness’. I resisted, explaining that I would not let go of my New Testament, for I lived by it. There was such a flood of satanic, mean mockery of the Word of God that I trembled all over my body. God gave me the strength to respond calmly and firmly to all the insults, so that finally the degenerate boss got bored and he threw my New Testament at me with contempt. So I moved with my New Testament, arm in arm with a dear brother in office, in a dark night on March 4, 1919, from custody to the actual prison with the prayer request of Psalm 121 [Psalms 121:8]: God bless “thy going out and thy coming in”! In the dark, unheated cell we entered, we prayed Col. 4:3: “that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds.” It is wonderful how God has opened the door for us. Not only was I allowed to speak of the mystery of Christ in my own cell in front of my sixteen fellow prisoners every morning and evening, but there were also days when I was allowed to preach the Gospel in four other cells. [cp. Bonhoeffer on Isaiah just before his execution] What profound hours in the presence of God were these! There were always some among the listeners who were doomed to die! What a hunger for divine words was everywhere! How often did the request come: “Please try to sneak into our cell to pray with us! And in many cells other men prayed with their comrades. There was hardly a cell where they did not pray regularly. Men who had not learned to pray, here they learned and vowed not to unlearn it. And as the men, so the women.” (p. 33 f.) [How many became Christians in Siberia?!]
Schabert thus continues:
“Bolshevism [i.e. Communism] became a murderer everywhere, in Moscow as in Petersburg, in Munich as in Ofen-Pest [Hungarian: Buda-Pest?]; in the Baltic countries they became a mass murderer. In the five months of their reign they carried out 3,654 death sentences in Riga [capital of Latvia]; how many in the whole of the Baltic region cannot yet be determined. Red was their flag, bloody was their rule. Without law and justice, mostly without interrogation, the death sentences were carried out according to a revolutionary conscience. When 30 were sentenced to death and only 27 of them were found in the prisons, because in the prevailing disorder one did not know where the three missing prisoners were locked up, three prisoners of any other kind were taken and shot, because ‘thirty had to be shot’. The number of direct executions goes into the thousands, in Riga, as I said, 3,654; in Wesenberg [now Rakvere], a country town in Estonia, 300 at one time; in Dorpat [now Tartu], in the dreadful ‘murder cellar,’ 150 found death in one night, etc. Innumerable were shot during transport because of ‘suspicion of escape’ and even without the suspicion of escape. Of the men, women, children, and old people, driven as hostages from Mitau [now Jelgave] to Riga in the dark night on the slippery, 45-kilometer-long highway, arrived alive in Riga; the others, as soon as they fell or slipped from tiredness, were shot by the executioners who were sitting on horseback and chasing them. 215 found their deaths on this Via Dolorosa [Latin for "Sorrowful Way"]. Next to the bullet, the spotted typhus cleaned up terribly among those interned in the prison. The Bolsheviks made the prisoners starve and freeze, often even preventing relatives from bringing food to the prisoners: ‘What then is the harm if “Burschuis” [citizens] die? They do not need to be shot to death then.’ Of course they did nothing for hygiene. The vermin, especially the lice, these carriers of typhus, were countless. Warm water for washing the body — to say nothing of a bath [page 211] — was given to the detainees once every two weeks. There was no medication. Those who were infected were almost certainly doomed to death. The heart was weakened by dropsy [or Edema] caused by starvation, camphor was not available or was not given; so the heart could not withstand the fever. Thus tens of thousands became victims of the satanic Bolshevik rule.” (p. 37 f.)
“The murdered were probably all martyrs of justice, for they were judged without any moral guilt, having been condemned mostly without interrogation, on false pretences. Some were also martyrs of truth, which they testified to by their word against the Communists. But many were also martyrs of Christ, who suffered for His sake because they could not refrain from testifying to Him, above all the pastors, who through their ministry must come forward with such testimony”. (p. 45)
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| Hahn — Eckhardt — Hesse — Paucker — Wachsmuth — Grüner — Wühner |
Among the latter, whose martyrdom Schabert also briefly describes, belong Prof. Dr. [Traugott] Hahn, pastor of the university parish in Dorpat; Provost [August] Eckhardt of Riga; the Estonian Pastors [Karl Immanuel] Hesse, [Walther] Paucker in Wesenberg, [Paul] Wachtsmuth [or Wachsmuth], [Wilhelm] Grüner [or Vilhelms Grīners], and [Richard] Wühner. [Images: Schabert, Bildnisse] These and other names of Baltic pastors, who were honored to praise the Lord with their witness unto death, are found written on the “Martyr's Stone” [more images and here, 🔗, list w/ links], which was unveiled on May 22, 1920, from the old Riga cemetery, the resting place of many witnesses. Many church members also died as witnesses of truth. Schabert says:
“Who can name all those who, among the many who were executed, praised Christ unto death? … All those who stood in such suffering humbly testify that they would never want to cut this great time out of their lives for the sake of their great inner gain.” (p. 56)
“At a time when even the best are almost despondent as to whether the Gospel still has a world-overcoming power in it, God lets these heroes of faith arise before us, so that we may align our weak faith with them: Behold, these are Christians, who have overcome by the blood of the Lamb!” (p. 60)
These Baltic martyrs belong without doubt to the noblest figures and greatest heroes of the World War [WWI]. From them one can also draw on as evidence against the cries of the enemies of the bankruptcy of Christianity. Christ still reigns, and as long as He does not succumb, even the gates of hell will not be able to overcome His kingdom. May the martyrdom of the Balts also bear this fruit, that they resist all modernism and in all points remain with the old doctrines of Luther, or rather return to them! F. B. [Friedrich Bente]
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