Nicole Valery is not well known in the Church but her memoir of imprisonment in communist Romania deserves to be considered a classic of Christian writing. It is full of the faith, hope and love that helped her to endure horrific suffering while detained without trial as a political prisoner.
Stories of murder and repression in the Far East may be well known to today’s Christians. But there were once many more stories of harsh persecution – of the very worst kind – in the Eastern communist states before the repressive regimes collapsed in the late 1980s.
Valery was a writer imprisoned in 1949 in the wake of the communist takeover of Romania. Her associations with rival political factions made her a target of the new regime. She was to spend four 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 these indignities: “Prisoner rejoice” or “Benie sois tu, prison” (Blessed are you, prison) in the original 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 power of faith to sustain a person 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 will find unexpected power to overcome 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 child but rejected it in early adulthood and would dabble in the occult and look to politics as the answer to the world’s problems. However while she was still free, a friendship with Sabina Wurmbrand – wife of the better-known Romanian prisoner Richard, founder of Voice of the Martyrs – would introduce her to the living faith that would be her support in the difficult years ahead. Wurmbrand, also known as Nicolai Ionescu, wrote “Tortured for Christ” and became well known in the Western church for advocating for the persecuted church.
Early in Valery’s time in prison, she created a “rule” to help her devotion to Jesus. This included: that God is love, that He would not 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 must take advantage of the time I spend here behind bars to change spiritually, to be useful to others, to earn patience, the value of sacrifice for one’s neighbour. I must learn never to harbour the least vestige of hatred towards those who 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” because of her loving reactions: “right from the start I smiled at them, because looking through the peephole they saw my lips move, because as the questioning became more intense they sometimes 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 could feel it themselves.
“I was never able to tell them, that despite the pain in my body, my spirit was upheld by a sense of serenity and joy. I never managed to let them know that I felt no hatred towards them, indeed that I was trying to love them and that I was praying for them with love, even as they were throwing buckets of water over me to bring me round when I passed out, or threatening to beat me when I could not take another step.”
After this period of brutal interrogation and solitary confinement, she was placed in a large prison with women from a wide variety of backgrounds, including prostitutes and religious sisters. Soon they would start to grow in faith together, helped by the chance discovery of a Bible, which they separated into 66 books and shared throughout the community, for private 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 as it sank into each of our minds,” she wrote. “It was a completely natural act, a need felt by a host of souls united together in one faith and hope.”
Listening to the sad stories of the ordinary prisoners’ lives would touch Valery and the other political detainees deeply. But sadly their time spent on prayer and worship would soon be restricted when they were sent in small groups to forced labour camps. Valery would slave to build a canal while being fed meagre rations, and even had 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 love every one of the women around her and love them “wholeheartedly” even though she did not know them.
She wrote that as she loved them, she “suffered with them” and they confided in her, even though it was difficult to bear their hurts and pains as well. Trying to carry 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 an opportunity to share the gospel. Bible verses she had memorised as a child came to her and strengthened her. She decided to write them on the walls of the prison in order to pass on that strength to those who would occupy her cell at a later date.
Towards the end of her time in prison she was to discover the effect these efforts had on just one woman, Eva, who said she was inspired to repent and turn to God by the words written on a cell wall. Valery recalled Eva’s words: “Using the words which came to my lips and inspired by the lines I had found scrawled on the walls, I spoke to God, and opened my heart to Him with all its corruption. I asked Him to forgive me, to guide me, to protect me.” The two became friends.
On her release, Valery would marry writer Sergiu Grossu, 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 has similarities with that of the more famous victim of communism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who would himself come to faith after prison swept away his delusions about the Soviet regime and allowed childhood seeds of Christian faith to sprout. His work has been given more attention recently as it is often 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 came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Valery spared the reader the details of the torture she endured. In any case, she wrote, it was not this trauma that stayed with her, but the presence of Jesus during her suffering: “That is why I am trying to retain in these lines only the aspects that have remained unaltered, living, still as fresh within me as when they happened, in particular the wonderful times I spent with Jesus, constantly in His presence, constantly 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 same convictions and the same ideal. Such matters are written indelibly on my soul, and if I write them down, it is so that those who still do not know that the happiness of a life given over totally to Jesus can have this same joy.”
Heather Tomlinson is a freelance Christian writer. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com or via X (twitter) @heathertomli
