There was another aspect of these concentration camps that interested me and was not discussed on the CBC radio show. They had some very peculiar enemies that included, of all people, Christian Evangelical Pastors. How could they possibly be dangerous?

The Belene labour camp located on an island in the Danube River in which we sailed, had about 2,323 inmates at the height of the repression in 1952.  Most of them were men, but about 75 were women. The prisoners included Bulgarian Turks who resisted the official policy of forcing the Turks to change their names and surnames to Bulgarian names. Go figure. The Bulgarians wanted the Turks to be assimilated, much like Canadian educational authorities wanted Indigenous boys and girls to be assimilated in Canada’s residential schools. Probably, just as in Canada, the authorities thought they were doing this for their own good.

From 1949 on, in Bulgaria, Evangelical Christian pastors were also targeted as “enemies of the State.” There was an infamous trial in which 13 such Pastors were tried at a Show Trial, convicted, and sent to the Belene concentration camp in the Danube River.

One of them, was Haralan Popov who survived the experience later and founded a mission called “Door of Hope International” to bring Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. He published his autobiography in a book called Tortured to Death for His Faith. I am not sure why he called it that, since he survived to write about it. Its Bulgarian title was The Bulgarian Golgotha. I guess he thought he was Christ-like.

But why would they attack pastors?  According to a Google AI search, it was “because their faith and activities were seen as “a challenge and alternative to the official state ideology of atheism and communist control.”  Again, according to Google AI, “In essence, any form of independent association, loyalty to an authority other than the state (God or foreign church leaders), or independent thought was perceived as an existential threat to the communist regime’s absolute control over all aspects of society.” Apparently, some of the pastors were even tortured to induce them to confess their sins against the state.

Authoritarians don’t like rebellion and invariably deal with it harshly.  Rebellion is always a threat to the regime. Even from pastors.