Extracts from an address given at the Annual Meeting of the Trinitarian Bible Society (1954).
By PASTOR A. E. POKORNY.
* Taken from Trinitarian Bible Society’s Quarterly Record for October-December, 1954.—Editor.
AUSTRIA is a country which most people know because of its music, but the majority of Austrians have never yet seen or read the Bible. There are no Bibles in the schools. I myself had never seen a Bible before 1933. After spending six years in a Roman Catholic Monastery I went to spy on certain Protestant missionaries to find out all about them, and there I got my first copy of the Bible. But I could not read it for it was in English. I had heard about the Holy Bible, and we were told in the Monastery that the Bible was so very holy that ordinary mortals could not read it. Being interested, I went to a Protestant missionary and asked if he had a German translation of this book. He brought me a brand new German translation and said, “I will make you a present of this.” I replied that I was not interested in religion, but I had had six years in monasteries, and I wanted to read this Book because I wanted to find out what I was not supposed to know.
Since 1945 in Austria we have had religious liberty, and when I heard of the new law which the Allies had imposed upon my country—the Roman Church would never have done it—and that it was now perfectly legal to read the Bible or sell it or distribute it from door to door, God laid it on my heart to get the Bible into Austria. Soon after the end of the war I put an advertisement in an Austrian evening paper: “Gratis—Bible on application,” followed by my name and address in this country, because I was at that time a refugee over here from the Nazis. Within one week 120 letters and postcards arrived asking me for a Bible.
Until that time (1947) I had never heard of the Trinitarian Bible Society. I found various book shops and organisations, but they all said, “We have no German Bibles.” I could only get three German Bibles in London. At a public meeting in Reading I told the audience about these letters asking for Bibles, and after a few days I received a letter from Mr. Chambers of the Trinitarian Bible Society saying that their local friends at Reading had heard of the need of Austria and that they had a few thousand German Bibles in the press. I took the bull by the horns. I cancelled an engagement and went to London and saw Mr. Chambers, the secretary of the Society, and I got 300 Bibles given me straight away. That was how it started in 1947. Since then the Trinitarian Bible Society has given us very much and we have sent out these beautiful Bible to Austria. They are wonderfully printed and the letters we get back are most appreciative. I have a sheaf of them here, and if there were time I should like to read them to you.
Austria is now 86 per cent. Roman Catholic, and we have 400,000 Protestants in a country of seven million people. Now that the Bible is allowed to be read there has arisen a great demand for it. One letter I have was from a Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Reconstruction in Austria. He wrote, “I want to thank you very much for this most wonderful present. You have given me tremendous joy by the gift of these Bibles. If you ever come back to Vienna I shall be glad to meet you personally.” Well, I did go back, and I did meet him. I sent in my card, and after we had had some conversation I said to him, “Will you please tell me one thing: why did you want a Bible?” He replied that during the war he had been in a concentration camp and with him was a General. They had a corner in the hut together and he saw this General reading a book which he wrapped in brown paper. He thought it was a book of poetry, and one day when the General was out he looked at the book and found it was the Holy Scriptures. He said to the General afterwards, “I am rather surprised to see you reading this Book.” And the General said, “In this Book I find comfort and it sustains me even in this concentration camp.” My friend asked the General if he might read it, and he did so, but he was there only a short time; it was the end of the war and the Americans were approaching this part of Germany and those in the concentration camp were liberated.
My friend returned to his own country and stood for Parliament in the first elections and was elected.
On one occasion he said to his wife, “If you have a chance of getting hold of a Bible, do get one.”
One day, in the reading room in Vienna he picked up one of the evening papers and read the advertisement which I had put in, “Gratis—a Bible.”
We had one postcard which read, “Re your advertisement; could I have a Bible, a German one, and if you can send one in English my wife would like it. The Old Testament would be sufficient. We are both Austrians and Roman Catholics.” At first I thought they were Jews because they wanted only the Old Testament. I found later on that they were of opinion that as they belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, which was considered the older church, its sacred book would be the Old Testament, whilst Protestants, who were a newer church, had the New Testament. We told our correspondent that we thought the New Testament would help him as well.
In my travels through Austria I have stumbled upon small groups of people who have gathered themselves together as Bible students. They may have been Methodists, or members of the Lutheran Church, but one or more of them have received copies of the Bible and through the reading of the Bible their eyes have been opened and some of them have started Bible study groups in their own homes. In that way often small Churches have been formed. These people call themselves Bible Christians, but they have no connection with any organisation of that name. In this way we are very grateful to the Trinitarian Bible Society for the comfort, consolation, and salvation which it has been the means of bringing into many an Austrian home.
In Austria we have a quarter of a million displaced persons still, refugees from anywhere between the Baltic and the Balkans. In one camp of 5,000 people I found 16 nationalities. We take the Bible to these camps. Some of these refugees come from countries behind the Iron Curtain and the Bible has been smuggled into the countries from which they have come. One third of Austria is occupied by the Russians, and some of those who live in the Russian Zone of Austria are members of the underground movement for the circulation of the Scriptures. Thus the Bible goes into the eastern parts of Europe and Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. The Bible in some countries is reckoned as subversive literature.
If I were to send to a Russian in the occupied part of Austria a New Testament or a Gospel I should be liable to be arrested for subversive activities. I can tell the story of one Russian soldier who found a New Testament and began to read it. Some of the passages were underlined in red, which signified something to him as a Communist. Among those passages he read a most revolutionary statement, in which Paul said, “Therefore, if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new.” This Communist soldier was nurtured in revolution. He had been told that the revolutionaries were going to change the world and create a new world order. Then he finds this Book and reads something more revolutionary still. He realised that there was one thing the Communists could not change: they could not change human nature except for the worse. He began to tell his friends about this new discovery, but not for long; the Secret Police heard of it, but he was able to escape into the British Zone.
May I say of myself that at one time I hated religion; I was a Nazi leader until made a new man in Christ.
Now, since the war, I find that men and women in Austria from all walks of life are asking for the Scriptures, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain lives are being revolutionised by the power of the Word of God and the influence of the Holy Spirit. Only a few days ago I received a hundred more copies of the Scriptures for this work.