A STRATEGY FOR STRENGTHENING ROMANIAN SEVENTH DAY ADVENTIST FAMILIES

Party members whispered prayers and crossed themselves in the air-raid shelters; Georgi Knyazev, self-styled humanist and worshipper of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, by the depths of January mused through the eighteen-hour nights on the strength of the light fitting in his ceiling БЂ” he would hang himself, he had decided, if his wife died before him БЂ” and his БЂfavourite theme of Christ, that amazing teacher of love and mercy from faraway GalileeБЂ™.37 A painter, dying alongside his wife, drew sketches of a fiery angel, of Christ БЂ” his skull-shaped head resembling those of the starving БЂ” and of the Virgin spreading her protective veil over the well-like courtyard of a blacked-out apartment block.38 Old Believers and Seventh Day Adventists continued, as they had done since 1938, to hold services in secret, in their homes. The mother of one such family (whose husband, a priest, was already in prison) made her six children kneel for long hours on the floor, praying. When they became emaciated she let them kneel on pillows (two out of the six died).39 Muslims and Buddhists also had to worship in secret, despite the fact that thousands were serving on the Leningrad front, and that the city possessed both a mosque and a magnificent Buddhist temple, built during the reign of Nicholas II and the tethering point of the barrage balloon that served as its wartime radio mast ...»