I went to the café where I had arranged to meet Silvia. She was sitting at a table waiting for me. I sat down with her, guarding my bag carefully.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“The president’s personal assistant received me well,” I said. “But the president was not there, so I have to go back… When I left his office, I saw that my skirt left a wet spot on his couch!” We had a good laugh about that.
As we were sitting there talking, I noticed a familiar face. It was Mr Ştefănescu, a colonel in the secret police. He had appeared out of nowhere at other difficult times in my life and tried to deceive me. He was a small, skinny man in his late thirties with thick glasses. He was very devoted to the president. He made a sign that he wanted to talk to me. I got up to talk to him.

“Miss Genovieva Sfatcu,” he said. “Do you remember me? I would like to invite you to eat with me in a very good restaurant. I need to talk with you about that letter.”

I heard the Holy Spirit warn me: Danger! Don’t go!

“No, I can’t,” I said.

“Please, please!” he insisted. “I beg you, please come with me!”

“I won’t go anywhere with you, Mr Ştefănescu!” I said as my heart beat fast. I ran back to where Silvia was sitting.

Lord, help me! I prayed. Protect the letter!

Suddenly the Holy Spirit flashed into my mind: Go to Mircea Iraşog.

“Let’s get out of here,” I told Silvia. She took her guitar and followed me out into the street. I waved down a taxi.

“Bulevardul Dâmboviţa, number twelve,” I told the driver.

The secret police will give us a break when they see where we go, I thought.

Mircea Iraşog worked in the Romanian diplomatic service and was a former ambassador. I knew his mother very well when she was alive. She was a secret believer, a neighbor of ours in Iaşi, who lived on her own in a little house round the corner from us. However, she was illiterate and she needed help in reading letters from her son. I had helped her in this way since I was eight. She received a letter from him every two weeks or so.

Then she would call me and I would go to her house, read her the letter and write a reply that she would dictate to me. I knew the address by heart, but I never imagined that I would need it myself.

Silvia and I found our way to the apartment block and knocked at a door on the ground floor. Mircea’s wife, Lenuţa, opened the door. She was a beautiful woman, tall and elegant, with rosy cheeks and blue eyes. She immediately called her husband. Mircea came to the door and I recognized him from pictures his mother had shown me. He was well built with curly, light brown hair. They were both in their late forties.

“I am Genovieva, the girl who used to read your letters to your mother and write her replies,” I said. “And this is my friend Silvia.”

“Oh! Come on in!” he responded. “So you are the girl with the beautiful handwriting! Thank you for helping my mother.”

“Your mother used to give me cherries and nuts from her garden,” I told him. “And I loved to play with Ţoiu.”

Mircea laughed. That was the name of his mother’s cat.

“What are you doing in Bucharest?” he asked.

“I am in trouble,” I said. “I came to Bucharest to deliver an important letter to Ceauşescu, and after I tried to deliver it, the secret police followed me everywhere. Then it crossed my mind that I knew your address by heart, so we came here…”

“How can we help you?” they asked.

“Could you put us up for the night?”

“Certainly… you can have the spare bedroom.”

Lenuţa laid the table and prepared a meal for us.

Then Mircea became serious, “Can you tell me a little more about this letter?”

“It is a letter from a university professor in Denmark. The essence of it is that if Ceauşescu blesses Israel he and Romania will be blessed, but if he curses Israel he will be cursed,” I answered.

“I know the president and his family well,” Mircea said in a whisper. “I ate many times with them… If this letter is to do with Israel, you will have no success. Ceauşescu hates the Jews… People think he likes the Jews, because he allows them to emigrate, but of course he receives plenty of money for it and it is just a show… I can tell you that he curses the Jews every time he mentions them, and he gets red with anger whenever Israel is mentioned.”

Then Lenuţa invited us to the table and served the evening meal. It was soup followed by fried chicken with garlic, tomato and cucumber salad with chopped mint, home-made bread and apple pie. They brought sparkling mineral water from the refrigerator.

I was very hungry and so was Silvia. After we had finished eating, Silvia got out her guitar and we sang four or five songs for them. One of the songs was: “Do you know the Lord Jesus? Do you know Him, my friend? He loves you and died for you…” There was an anointing on our voices. Mircea and Lenuţa had tears in their eyes.
“We never heard anything like that,” they said.

“Jesus said, ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life,’” I explained. “‘No one comes to the Father except through Me.’ If we believe, we have eternal life right now.”

“How can I get a Bible?” Lenuţa asked. I immediately got out my well worn copy and gave it to her.
She started to read it. We thanked them for the meal and made our way to bed.

The bedroom was luxurious with velvet curtains and soft carpets and a private bathroom. The shower was a luxury for us. The bed had white, embroidered sheets with towels to match. How happy we were and thankful to the Lord!

“He’s right, Silvia,” I said. “I know Ceauşescu hates the Jews and gave orders for the secret police to persecute those who love Israel.”

“I remember what happened to the prayer group for Israel that Ulf inspired,” she replied. “It met for several years in Lidia Ababei’s apartment in Iaşi.”

“Yes, the secret police sent Mihai Ciubotaru to infiltrate the group… He worked for them and pretended to repent with tears… He even got them to baptize him in secret. But then he turned the whole group in to the police.”

“My niece, Gabi, was part of that group,” Silvia added. “She and a Christian student from Jordan who loved Israel were both killed at the same time at the hands of the secret police. And Lidia Ababei was imprisoned in Socola Psychiatric Hospital in Iaşi for three and a half years.”

We prayed the Lord’s protection over us that night, pulled the soft covers up over us and went to sleep.
The next morning we went back to Nuţa Damian. When no one was looking we put the letter back with the other one in the armchair.

The secret police knew where we were and they sent a leading Baptist pastor to try to get the letter from me. He came to meet me with his wife. I had never had fellowship with this man. He was proud and controlling and had a hidden agenda. My pastor, Radu Cruceru, who was killed by the secret police, told me before he died that he was not afraid of the secret police or of the police, but only of this “pastor.”

“Genovieva,” he said, “the authorities know that you have a letter for the president. Please give it to me. I will take it to the president; I only have to make a phone call.”

“No way!” I said. I felt in my heart that he was a liar and a betrayer.

The “pastor” needed to call someone and while he was on the phone, his wife came to talk to me.

“Genovieva,” she whispered, “I’m glad you didn’t give it to him. He never got as close to the president as you did.”

After the “pastor” and his wife left, I went out to buy some bread. The police stopped me, took me to one of their offices and a policewoman gave me a thorough body search. They didn’t find anything and had to let me go. How happy I was that I didn’t have the letter on me!

The authorities had a problem. They were frantic: they knew I had not delivered the letter to Predescu, they had failed to persuade me through Mr Ştefănescu, and they had also failed to get the letter through the “pastor.” They now had searched me in the street and found nothing.

When we returned to Nuţa’s apartment, the phone rang. It was my brother Teodor calling from a public phone in Iaşi.

“Genovieva, the secret police came to search the house for the letter,” he said. “They turned every room upside down. They found that envelope addressed to the president by Ulf, the one that got wet, with Maria’s letter inside. They immediately confiscated it. They were sure they had found what they were looking for and took it under armed guard to commander Ionescu!

I roared with laugher.

“Do you remember what her letter said?” Teodor continued. “It was a shopping list. She wrote, ‘I need a kilo of sugar, a little rice, some beans, flour, oil, a bag of chamomile tea, and if possible some nuts and olives.

Praise to the Lord! Maria.’”

I stayed with Nuţa Damian a few more days. Silvia had to return to Iaşi, but she arranged for another friend, Rodica, to come to be with me. Before she left, Silvia helped me turn the armchair upside down and we got out one copy of Ulf’s letter.

Rodica was a student with me in Iaşi. She had been very faithful in helping with the distribution of Bibles. We had had many adventures together.

I heard that Ceauşescu was back in Bucharest and I felt that now was the right time to deliver the letter. I called Predescu.

“When can you receive me?” I asked. “I want to deliver the letter.”

“Sure, my little flower!” he said. “Come at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. I will tell the guards to let you in.”

Rodica prayed for me all the time and waited at an Orthodox Church.

“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39).

Again I took a taxi to the presidential palace. This time the guards at the door let me in with no trouble and I was quickly escorted to the second floor. Mr Predescu received me warmly.

“I know Ceauşescu is in town,” I said. “When can I deliver the letter to him?”

“I told him about it,” he replied. “He knows it is a letter to save his life and he asked me to take it for him. It will certainly get into his hands. Please believe me.”

Suddenly the Holy Spirit told me, You can trust him. The letter will be delivered. So I gave him the letter.

I knew very well how Ceauşescu would respond, however. I knew how much he hated the Jews. What judgments would come on him and on Romania as a result?

“Any time you come to Bucharest and want to see me you can give me a call,” Mr Predescu said. I prayed for him and ask the Lord to bless him. He kissed my hand and I left.

I felt that my mission in Bucharest was accomplished. The Lord had helped me to deliver the letter to the president. But that did not help me in the court case that awaited me. On the contrary it could make my situation worse.

From Bucharest, rather than going straight back to Iaşi, I took the train to Brăila to say good-bye to my sister, Aurora, before the trial. She had become a doctor and married and moved away from Iaşi.

As the train headed north-east from the capital, I strengthened myself in the Lord. I meditated on the words of Yeshua, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39).
Would He save me this time? It seemed impossible.

Aurora lived on the third floor of a new apartment block. She gave me a room to myself and it was simply furnished with a bed, a table and a chair on a wooden parquet floor. I stayed there for a week. The day of the trial was not far off. My sentence was already spelled out.

One day we went shopping. The secret police became frantic and I was followed all the time. I had never been so guarded in my life. I thought there was no future for me.

Another day we walked along the banks of the River Danube. I noticed lovers my age walking happily hand in hand, planning their future, without a care in the world. How different life was for me! It was as if I was waiting for my own funeral: life in a Romanian prison.

The next morning I knelt by the window in my room with my Bible in front of me. I opened it to Isaiah and read: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you… When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned… Since you are precious and honored in My sight, and because I love you, I will give men in exchange for you, and people in exchange for your life. Do not be afraid, for I am with you” (Isaiah 43:2, 4 & 5). It seemed that only great suffering was ahead.

But the Lord was about to show His power on my behalf in an astonishing way. I was eating a late supper with Aurora and Virgil and their young children, Laura and Babi. A friend of the family was also present.

Suddenly the apartment began to shake. The plates rattled violently.

“Earthquake!” Virgil shouted.

He and Aurora took the children in their arms and we all rushed to the door and started down the stairs from the third floor. If we stood up we were tossed from wall to wall. The only way we could get down was in a sitting position, sliding down the stairs. We finally made it out the door at the bottom of the block and ran as fast as we could away from the building toward a vacant lot.

The sky turned red and I heard a deafening rumble from deep within the earth. I could see apartment blocks seven stories high swaying from side to side like wheat in the wind.

I looked around for the secret police, but they had disappeared. They never came back. I bowed down and worshiped the Lord, my face to the ground. Everyone was outside and we all spent the night in the street. The radio announced a state of emergency in Romania, especially in Bucharest which was the worst hit.

The next day I heard that the only way I could get back home to Iaşi was via Bucharest. So I went back to Nuţa Damian while I waited for the train tracks to Iaşi to be repaired. I walked through the city streets and saw large blocks leveled to the ground. Recovery teams pulled out bodies from the rubble, but my enemies were nowhere to be seen. The damage was later calculated to be at least two billion dollars.

While I was in Bucharest I called Mr Predescu.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“There is damage to the buildings, but we are all right… I delivered the letter to the president as I promised, the same day you gave it to me, and he read it. That was a week ago now…”

The country was in such bad shape that the borders were opened for international help for months after the earthquake. All charges against Christians were dropped. The Lord had again done a miracle and I was free again. Oh, how I rejoiced!

(to be continued)

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