You are free to sing: “Christ is Risen!”.

   Father George Calciu (1925-2006) was a sufferer for Christ. A Romanian by birth, an Orthodox Christian by upbringing, and a priest by vocation, “Calciu” spent a total of twenty-one brutal years in prison, tortured and subjected to brainwashing for his outspoken evangelism and criticism of communist materialism.

   George Calciu was the youngest of eleven children, raised by devout parents as a faithful Orthodox Christian. Romania became communist in 1944, and the government soon began to crack down on the Church. Calciu was a medical student at the time, and his open faith made him suspect. He was imprisoned in 1948, where he was subjected to 1984-style mind control experiments, which aimed to torture the convicts until they denied Christ, and then were forced to torture others toward the same end. “They wanted our souls,” he recalled, “not our bodies.”