but unspeakable joy fills our hearts when we hear the natives now saying: ‘Come!’ I was sent to work a long distance from our settlement and in my endeavors to communicate to others the fire burning within me I found a family of six persons who now love the truth. I gave them a Bible, and after I had worked with them for several months they too began to witness and to find interested persons. In the evening we always go out on the street of our little village and sing aloud our songs that re-echo in the Siberian forests.”

A repatriated Polish prisoner reports: “When the day finally came to return to Poland, the commander came and said with deep emotion: ‘I recognize that the hand of the great Jehovah is over you, for otherwise you would never have been able to leave Siberia in your capacity as unshakable witnesses of Jehovah. May your God bless you.’”

Many witnesses were freed during 1956, but others remain. For thousands who were sent to Siberia in 1951 there still is no possibility of their getting Bibles or Bible literature. These witnesses, innocent, peace-loving people, are forbidden to maintain contact among themselves, or to form congregations. Why is it, then, that the Russian Orthodox Church, the Baptists and other religions enjoy relative freedom? Only because they have stated their willingness to obey Caesar rather than God. Jehovah’s witnesses refuse to do this because it would be unfaithfulness to God.

IN POLAND AND ELSEWHERE

This oppression of innocent Christians has been evident not just in Soviet Russia, but also in all the satellite countries—in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and elsewhere.

In Poland the people had suffered under a church-supported feudalistic system that comforted the poor and needy only with the distant promise of a reward beyond the grave. The peasants paid with suffering and misery for the lives of pleasure of the privileged, and had ceased to be serfs in name only. But under communism, which overthrew the hated old system, the Poles suffered under the same terroristic machinery that had been set up in Russia.

Economic conditions were extremely severe. Morals worsened. The Communists spoke of freeing women from “the slavery of the kitchen” to work in industry, but the Polish press now blames the collapse of morals, of the family and the increasing banditism among adolescents on the fact that the women left their homes for the factories.

But, despite these difficulties, religious persecution is again one of the outstanding marks of a totalitarian state. The total state butted squarely against the activity of Jehovah’s witnesses. For the first time the Polish Communists met a whole people who stood firm. So determined was their worship that the officials were bewildered.

Thousands of modest, honest men, women and children (workers, peasants and housewives), who were all nonsensically suspected or accused of spying, witnessed of their Kingdom hope to their brutal arresters. All spoke the same thing. They provided a tremendous witness to the name of Jehovah, to his King Christ Jesus and for God’s new world of righteousness. Even the most fanatical Communist official, hearing again and again the same things, had to see that his charges were crumbling to nothing. The majority of those arrested were released after some hours of questioning or a couple of days, but hundreds of such innocent people were kept in prison in that brutal “paradise” of oppression, violence and bloodshed.

Many persons learned the truth, both inside and outside the prison walls. Hundreds and thousands welcomed the witnesses and were willing to be taught by Jehovah. They had seen that it was a defamation to say that Jehovah’s witnesses were in league with the Communists, as the Catholic clergy had done, and that it was also a lie to say that the witnesses were spies, as the Communists had done.

Violence and torture failed to shake them. The Beria-type examination of the Watch Tower Society’s branch servant and other responsible ministers lasted for months, but they came out unbroken in spirit, though often violently hurt in the flesh. A number of the witnesses died, preferring martyrdom to confessing to lies against these men who were doing God’s work in Poland.

But the number of witnesses increased for months without interruption. During all this persecution they suffered no spiritual hunger. They met in small groups, thus not forsaking the gathering of themselves together. Their “public lectures” were the funerals they conducted. Every funeral procession of hundreds of persons moving through towns and cities without priests was always a sensation, and provided a clear evidence that Jehovah’s witnesses were far from being “liquidated.”

Some witnesses had even done house-to-house work in certain villages, and since the de-Stalinization has set in, several tens of thousands of them have gone from house to house with the only message really worthwhile to be preached today.

They recognize, and hope that you will too, the vital difference between man’s failing solutions to the world’s problems and the only true solution now near at hand. That true solution is not a political one but is God’s kingdom. Now is the time to accept and conform to it to survive the end of Satan’s wicked system and to live through into the righteous new conditions that the Creator himself soon will bring to earth.

Communist Leaders Petitioned

“I SHALL put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.” Thus Jehovah God spoke to the Serpent in the garden of Eden. Down to our day that enmity has continued. Today that enmity is especially noticeable in the hatred that Communist rulers bear toward the witnesses of Jehovah.—Gen. 3:15, NW.

In fact, this enmity has been so bitter that for many years the fate of Jehovah’s witnesses in Russia and Siberia was not known. In recent years, however, the proof has continued to mount that there are thousands of witnesses in those places, as well as in other lands behind the Iron Curtain.

Little if any attention was directed to these witnesses until 1949. In July of that year a district assembly of Jehovah’s witnesses