God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

  For years I had been working alone. It meant traveling over eighty thousand kilometers a year; being away from home two-thirds of the time. I was prepared to do this as long as it seemed to be what God wanted. But how many times, lately, the work itself had suffered simply because I could not be in two places at once! I had never forgotten those people in Bulgaria who had asked me to come to their town just as I was leaving the country. By the time I got back to Bulgaria, nearly a year later, much had changed. The meetings they had believed would be so life-changing were no longer possible.

  But suppose—just suppose I had had a partner traveling with me! Suppose there were two of us . . . three of us . . . ten! Someone to be where another could not, to spell each other with the travel, the speaking, even the letter-writing!

  The possibility began to haunt me day and night. It would have to be an unusual fellowship, an organism, really, rather than an organization. The less formally we were organized the better, for if we were arrested we would not involve each other. We would be a small band of men—women, too, why not?—captured by the same vision of bringing hope to the Church in its need. Each of us would be a pioneer, probably not even sharing procedures and techniques, because then we would fall into a pattern that would be too easily recognized and too easily controlled.

  When I shared my dream with Corry, she practically shouted with joy.

  “I’ll be frank, Andrew—my reaction is altogether selfish. Do you realize that the four of us would be able to see you once in a while?”

  Immediately she was sorry she had said it. But I wasn’t. Of course my long absences were hard on us all. I could actually see Joppie and Mark Peter and Paul Denis grow between the time I took off and the time I came home again. Surely if I had help, these long, long trips would not be necessary.

  But how to go about finding the people? It wasn’t that others hadn’t offered from time to time. In fact, fairly often, at the close of a talk, I’d find three or four eager young men standing around the rostrum. “Brother Andrew, can I join you in your work behind the Iron Curtain? God has told me, too, to preach the Gospel there.” Others were probably a little more honest. “It sounds so exciting!” they would say. “I’d like to come just to carry your suitcases!”

  But I had never felt free to continue these conversations. It wasn’t as though I had a trick or system for getting across these borders again and again, which I could pass on to others to insure their safety too. It was no cleverness or experience of mine that had prevented disaster so far, only the fact that every morning of every trip I consciously placed myself in God’s hands and tried, in so far as possible, not to take a step outside His will. But these are not actions that one person can take for another. And so I would usually say, “Well, if I meet you behind the Iron Curtain, then by all means let’s talk some more.”

  And that would be the last I would hear of them.

  “Still,” I said to Corry one night, “if God wants us to expand the work, He certainly has prepared the people. How do I find them?”

  “Try prayer.”

  I laughed. That was my Corry. The one thing I had not yet done was to ask God for direct guidance to the right person. So we did pray, then and there. And immediately a name came to my mind.

  Hans Gruber.

  I had met Hans in Austria, working at a refugee camp. He was a Dutchman, a giant in size, six-feet-seven, heavy even for that height, and awkward beyond belief. He seemed to have six elbows, ten thumbs, and a dozen knees. And he spoke the most atrocious German I had ever heard.

  Everything about Hans, taken individually, was wrong. But put together into one stupendous whole, he was the most totally right personality I had ever met. He could stand up in the camp recreation area and hold five hundred people spellbound hour after hour, simply with words. I had seen it begin to rain while Hans spoke, in that indescribable German, without a single one of his listeners glancing at the sky. Even in the orphaned boys’ compound he was master. This group of 240 bored, restless kids was the terror of every other speaker who visited the camp. For Hans they sat like statues and then followed him around the camp afterward like pet sheep.

  That very evening I wrote Hans asking him if he had ever felt led to bring this preaching ministry behind the Iron Curtain. I knew, I wrote him, where my next trip would be. Newspapers for weeks had been full of the new relaxation of travel restrictions in Russia. It was now possible for foreigners to travel in the Soviet on their own, without an Intourist guide. It was the news I had been waiting for, for so long. The time had come to make my long-dreamed-of penetration into the heartland of Communism.

  By return mail Hans’s answer came back. He was ecstatic. My suggestion was for him the fulfillment of an old prophecy. When he was in the sixth grade—the last year of school he had attended—he had had a strange sensation every time he looked at the map of Russia. It was as though a voice kept telling him, “Someday you will work for Me in that land.”

  “And ever since then,” he wrote, “I’ve studied Russian to be ready when the time came. My Russian is very good now—almost as good as my German. When do we go?”

  With Hans’s letter came a major new step in my ministry, the taking on of a partner, the doubling of the work Christ was doing through this channel.

  ———

  There were a few rather important details to get behind us before we could get off. For one thing, we needed a new car. Even with the replacement engine, the VW no longer offered the security we needed. As for Hans folding his great bulk into that front seat—it was a clear impossibility. And so we purchased a new Opel station wagon. We could sleep in it, and we could carry a good many more Bibles.

  A problem of a more baffling nature turned out to be Hans’s driving.

  “I’ll never learn,” he moaned as I showed him for the thousandth time the coordinated motion of clutch and gear shift. One of the great side benefits in having a teammate, I had thought, would be someone to share the driving. I knew Hans could not drive, but I had assumed it would be a simple matter to teach him. Six hours later I admitted to myself that it might take a little longer than I had thought.

  The day of our departure came, and still he had no license. However, in most of Western Europe it is permissible for a learner to drive without one, provided he is seated next to a qualified driver and provided there is a brake between the two of them. We planned to take off on schedule. . . .

  And so we stowed our gear aboard, I hugged the boys one by one, kissed Corry again, and we were off. The Opel handled well in spite of its load. In addition to the Bibles, many more than I had ever carried before, there was all the camping and cooking equipment for two people. The extra weight did make the car weave slightly, and I thought I ought to let Hans get used to the new action before crossing the West-East border. So in Germany I turned the wheel over to him. Three miles later I took the wheel back again. Behind us was a line of cars and trucks several miles long.

  “Well, that was fine, Hans. You’re actually handling the car a little slowly for this highway, but never mind. The feel of it will come in time.”

  “I’m never going to get it. I know it.”

  “Nonsense. You ought to have seen me when I first started driving.” And to make him feel better I told him about my experience in the army driving the Bren carrier. And so we laughed our way into Berlin.

  If Hans was slow at learning mechanical skills, he was miles ahead of me in other ways. One of them was daring. The friends with whom we stayed in Berlin were enthralled at the idea of taking Bibles to the Soviet Union.

  “Our church has some Russian Bibles, Andrew! Couldn’t you take them along?”

  I wasn’t so sure. Already our gear was knobby to the point of looking suspicious.

  “Of course we’ll take them,” said Hans. And then he turned to me. “If we’re going to be arrested for carrying in Bibles, we might as well be arrested for carrying in a lot of them.”

  So we squeezed the extra book
s in. Then just as we were leaving, some other friends arrived with a whole carton of Ukrainian Bibles. I looked at Hans pleadingly, but I knew already that that box was going with us. This time there was simply no storage place left.

  “Well,” said Hans, “you told me you always leave a few Bibles in plain sight, so God can do the job and not you. I’ll just carry these on my lap.”

  ———

  Our transit visa allowed us 72 hours in Poland. There were many changes in Warsaw since my first visit to that city six years earlier. We passed the school where my hotel had been and the barracks where I had talked to the Red soldiers. But the rubble heap where I had seen the little girl was cleared away, and a park was on the site.

  I introduced Hans to friends both in Warsaw and other towns across the country as we made the most of our three days. And then, not thirty miles from the Russian border, I realized I had made a serious mistake in changing money, way back in Warsaw.

  “Do you know what I’ve done!” I said to Hans. “I exchanged too many guilders into zloty!”

  “Can’t you change them back again at the border?”

  “No, Warsaw’s the only place where you can get foreign currency. And if we go back there now, our visa will run out.”

  We were far out in the country, and Hans was at the wheel. He had agreed to drive only if there was no other car in sight, and there were many such times in Poland, even in 1961. I sat in the passenger’s seat beside him, trying to figure out just how much money we were out and how I could have been such an idiot, when suddenly up ahead I saw that we were coming to a tricky bit of driving. A bridge was out, and the bypass road plunged steeply down from the highway, crossed the stream on a flimsy temporary bridge, and rose straight up the embankment on the other side. A Polish Warszawa was even now ahead of us down in the gully, inching its way across the little bridge.

  I glanced at Hans to see how he was taking the situation. Perspiration was standing out on his lip as he gripped the wheel, but there was a determination in his eyes. Good! I thought, A few tough maneuvers like this one, and he’ll gain confidence.

  Hans turned off the pavement and started down the slope. To my delight he seemed to have the car in perfect control. We went neither faster nor slower than before. At his perpetual fifteen miles an hour he crept down the slope and onto the bridge. Now we were across. But now also the other car was directly ahead of us, toiling up the opposite side.

  Too late I realized that Hans was not going to stop. Like a movie in slow motion, he ground relentlessly into the rear of the Warszawa.

  The driver came spluttering back. His broad Slavic face was red, his fists clenched.

  “You pray while I try to talk with him,” I said to Hans.

  “Good morning, friend. Beautiful day,” I said in German. Together we stepped to the rear of his car and inspected the damage. Thanks to Hans’s snail’s pace, it was not great: The taillight and one rear fender were damaged. Our bumper and a front fender were dented.

  “Police,” said the man. “Police. Police.” That German word he knew well.

  But that was the one thing that mustn’t happen! Here we were loaded down with Bibles in a Communist country, and here was Hans with no driver’s license at the wheel.

  And then I remembered my wallet, stuffed with zloty. Was this why God had allowed me to make that foolish overexchange? “Well now,” I said, “how much do you think it will cost?”

  The Pole’s face did not change. “Police, police,” he said. I put a piece of glass back up against the taillight and shrugged, hoping to indicate that I didn’t think the damage was too great.

  “Six thousand zloty?”

  The man understood that all right. His fists unclenched, but he repeated again the single word “Police.”

  “Eight thousand zloty? Nine thousand? Surely the repairs wouldn’t cost more than nine thousand.” With a dramatic gesture, I reached into my wallet and drew out one more thousand-zloty note. “Ten thousand, and that’s a fair amount,” I said, holding the money out.

  He took it. As he raced back to his car, he shouted over his shoulder, “No police.” He started up the Warszawa and left us in a ring of dust.

  “Can I breathe now?” said Hans.

  “You can breathe.”

  And there in the dusty bypass we thanked the Lord for having allowed us to make one mistake in order to get us out of another.

  ———

  We made the border crossing at Brest. Hans could hardly contain his excitement as the barrier gate swung open. He insisted on using his Russian with the customs officials. I doubt if they could understand one word in ten, but they were tremendously complimented that he was making the effort.

  We must have been among the very first cars to enter without an Intourist guide. The guards were interested in their novel job of inspecting our papers and effects themselves, and they were delighted when we presented them with American dollars for exchange.

  “Russia and United States make insults,” one of the guards said in English with a wink. “But for these, we forgive.” He took the dollar bills. “One ruble for one dollar. That makes it easy.”

  At last came time for the inspection of the car itself. Hans and I had agreed ahead of time on the technique that we used ever afterwards whenever two people were crossing a border together. Only one of us would be talking at a time; the other would be constantly in prayer, prayer that God’s will be done in each detail of the inspection, prayer for the country we were entering—beginning with these employees at the border.

  In this case the guard asked us to open a couple of suitcases, but he hardly more than glanced inside. What he wanted to see was the Opel motor. He asked me some technical questions, then apparently felt embarrassed at having shown unofficial curiosity, and slammed the hood shut. He walked back with us through the little garden in front of the customs shed, stamped our papers, and wished us farewell.

  We were across.

  *Brother Andrew, Box 47, Ermelo, Holland.

  17

  Russia at First Glance

  It was Hans’s first trip into Russia but not mine. The year Mark Peter was born I had accompanied a group of young people from Holland, Germany, and Denmark to a Youth Congress in Moscow, much like the one in Warsaw years before. We were gone only two weeks, traveling by train and of course following an official schedule. Nevertheless, as a scouting trip it had been of enormous value. Several scenes especially had impressed me.

  They came back to me now as Hans and I drove across the vast Russian landscape. The drive from Brest to Moscow was 700 miles. I passed the time recalling for Hans those memories of my earlier trip.

  The hotel where I had been assigned, in reality a mammoth barracks, was in a village eight miles outside of Moscow. On our first free evening I walked into the village in search of the church.

  It was a Russian Orthodox onion-dome structure, which had obviously once been the heart of the village, standing in front of the town’s only well. Now it was in complete decay. Weeds grew where once feet had kept the walk packed and clear. The windows were boarded up. Packing cases were stacked outside as if the building were now being used as a warehouse.

  I walked around the entire structure looking for the cross, but it was gone. And then as I rounded the church for the second time, I saw the little sight that I never forgot. For here, tucked into the lock on the front door of the church was a little bouquet of fresh yellow flowers!

  Stepping closer, I saw that hundreds of withered flowers lay on the ground, as if these bouquets were changed regularly. In my mind’s eye I could see a peasant woman, dressed in black, slipping up to the church late at night with her act of love and remembrance.

  That Sunday I had made my way to the only Protestant church in all of Moscow that was still open. From what I had read in the Dutch press I was expecting a small and demoralized congregation.

  At first I wasn’t sure I had the right address. Why was that long line of people waiting o
utside? I took my place uncertainly at the end of it, when suddenly a man came up and spoke to me in German.

  “You’ve come to church?” he asked.

  “This is a church then?”

  “Of course. Come with me. There’s a special balcony reserved for foreign visitors.”

  So we went through a small door, down a hall, up a flight of steel stairs, and out onto the balcony. And there I saw for the first time the sight with which I was to become so familiar in future years: the Moscow Protestant Church at worship. The hall was rectangular in shape, narrow and long with two sets of balconies on each side, a platform seating twelve in the front, a fine organ, and a stained glass window facing east and bearing words that my friend translated as “God is Love.” The seating capacity of the church was about one thousand, and there were closer to two thousand there that morning.

  I had never in all of my travels seen so many people crowded into one building. Every seat was taken. The aisles were packed with standees, down the center and down both sides. The balconies were overflowing.

  Then the singing began. Two thousand deep Slavic voices in perfect unison. They drowned out the organ. Rich, throaty, full, lusty, masculine. I closed my eyes, and it was easy to imagine that I was hearing heavenly choirs. On and on they sang until there were tears in my eyes.

  When the time came for the collection, there was no way for the ushers to pass among so many, and so the banknotes were passed along hand-over-head to the front. As soon as the collection was taken, the sermons began. Yes, sermons. There were two of them, each standard length, one following the other.

  While the sermons were being delivered, it seemed to me that some of the congregation was acting very strangely. They were making paper airplanes and sailing them forward from the rear of the church and down from the balconies over the heads of the congregation below. No one seemed a bit disturbed by this bizarre behavior. The planes were captured and passed forward until finally they were collected by one of the men on the platform.