Virginia Prodan was born in Communist Romania, under the cruel dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. It was a “land of lies,” she says, where questioning the government could lead to prison and even death.

Writing in Christianity Today, Prodan describes a Romanian government so controlling that spies were planted in churches — and family members, neighbors, or classmates could turn one in for making anti-government statements, knowing this could lead to prosecution. Citizens had to remain silent and blend in. “We lived in a constant state of anxiety and mistrust,” she said.

Prodan is now an international human rights attorney and an allied attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. Her book Saving My Assassin appeared in June. For her defense of Christians, she was beaten, tortured and almost executed on the orders of Ceausescu himself. She was finally exiled to the United States in 1988.

Speaking in Whispers

Watching her own parents whisper about their beliefs in fear of governmental retribution, Prodan said she wondered, “Why do people always speak in whispers? Why are they so afraid to speak the truth?” The constant fear mongering that wilted the public’s spirits brought her to a place of truth-seeking. She decided to become an attorney. However, what she didn’t realize was that an attorney’s job essentially consisted of “rubber-stamping newly-created communist rules and regulations,” which she called demoralizing.

One evening, a client came in. He exuded peace. “It was as though he were somehow oblivious to all of the misery that surrounded him.” Without even thinking, she told him she wished she had what he had — his peace and happiness.

He asked her to accompany him to his church the following Sunday. She paused, thinking about the state’s hatred of God and church, remembering those who were persecuted, tortured and imprisoned for being a Christian. Other Christians just “disappeared.” Was this a trick to test her loyalty to the state? Prodan said she wanted the peace so much that it seemed worth the risk.

It was during the church service that everything made sense for the first time in her life. The pastor’s sermon that day was on John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” “I had spent years searching for the truth, but I had been looking in the wrong places — law school, the government, the justice system,” Prodan said. “I suddenly realized that truth was something that came not from law books, but from God himself: the Creator of the universe — my Creator, the source of all life, peace, and happiness.”

It took no time at all for Prodan to experience the persecution other Christians endured, after she began representing Christians for transporting Bibles across the Romanian border, witnessing in public or even privately worshipping in their own homes. What she experienced wasn’t just minor hate-speech. She was “kidnapped, bullied, pushed into moving traffic, and beaten by the secret police.” She and her children were threatened and once kept under house arrest for a month, her car tires were slashed.

I am Here to Kill You

Her faith was tested each day — no more so than the night a huge man sat in her office facing her, reached in his pocket and pulled out a gun. “You have failed to heed the warnings you’ve been given,” he said, as he aimed the gun straight at her. “I’ve come here to finish the matter once and for all. … I am here to kill you.”

Although she was alone with this man, she knew that someone was with her. She felt comforted by the Holy Spirit, and sensed that He was telling her to witness to this man. She began to see him not as a killer, but as a child of God.

As she began to talk to him about Jesus Christ and His love, he seemed to grow smaller. After listening to what she had to say, he stunned her with his words: “You are right. The people who sent me here are crazy. I do need Christ. … I will come to your church as a secret brother in Christ. I will worship your powerful God.”

Her would-be killer walked out a “brother in Christ,” and later enrolled in the seminary. “He, like me,” she said, “had found the Truth. And neither of us will be afraid to speak it ever again.”