Richard Wurmbrand, also known as Nicolai Ionescu (24 March 1909 – 17 February 2001) was a Romanian Evangelical Lutheran priest, and professor of Jewish descent.

[1] He experienced imprisonment and torture by the Communist regime of Romania, which maintained a policy of state atheism.

His colleagues in Romania urged him to leave the country and work for religious freedom from a location less personally dangerous.

After spending time in Norway and England, he and his wife Sabina, who had also been imprisoned, emigrated to America and dedicated the rest of their lives to publicizing and helping Christians who are persecuted for their beliefs.

When returning to his mother country, Wurmbrand was already an important Comintern agent, leader, and coordinator directly paid from Moscow.

[6] Wurmbrand, who passed through the penal facilities of Pitești, Craiova, Gherla, the Danube–Black Sea Canal, Văcărești, Malmaison, Cluj and ultimately Jilava, where he spent three years in solitary confinement.

Due to his extraordinary memory, he was able to recall more than 350 of those, a selection of which he included in his book With God in Solitary Confinement, which was first published in 1969.

He stated that his physical torture included mutilation, burning and being locked in a large frozen icebox.

During his first imprisonment, Wurmbrand's supporters were unable to gain information about him; later they found out that a false name had been used in the prison records so that no one could trace his whereabouts.

Their only son, Mihai, by then a young adult, was expelled from college-level studies at three institutions because his father was a political prisoner; an attempt to obtain permission to emigrate to Norway to avoid compulsory service in the Romanian army was unsuccessful.

Concerned with the possibility that Wurmbrand would be forced to undergo further imprisonment, the Norwegian Mission to the Jews and the Hebrew Christian Alliance negotiated with Communist authorities for his release from Romania for $10,000 (though the going rate for political prisoners was $1,900).

That testimony, in which he took off his shirt in front of TV cameras to show the scars of his torture, brought him to public attention.

[14][15] In April 1967, the Wurmbrands formed Jesus to the Communist world, later renamed Voice of the Martyrs, an interdenominational organisation working initially with and for persecuted Christians in Communist countries, but later expanding its activities to help persecuted believers in other places, especially in the Muslim world.

The new mayor of Bucharest had offered a storage space for the books under former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's palace, where he had spent years in confinement, praying for a ministry to his homeland.