How long before they come for us is some similar fashion?
" .... The peace Ella had found serving the poor at the Martha and Mary Convent was not to last. By 1918, as Moscow fell into anarchy and then Red Terror, one night a knock came at the door of the convent. Soon after Ella was bundled into the back of a truck by the secret police, acting under Lenin’s express orders, and driven off into the night.
Like the Royal Family before her, she was eventually taken to Alapayevsk in the Ural Mountains where the Red Army held her under armed guard. Deep down, Ella knew her fate had been sealed and, she wrote the following:
The Lord found that it was time for us to carry his cross. Let us strive to be worthy of that joy.
In the early hours of July 18, Ella and a number of others were taken to a nearby disused mine, one that had recently flooded. Ella was ushered forwards first by the now increasingly agitated Red Guards. Calmly she approached them. Knowing the hour had finally come, she knelt before her executioners and prayed: “Father, forgive them, for they know not….” She was unable to finish her prayer, however, for rifle butts bludgeoned her face. Dazed she was picked up and, to the horror of those watching, thrown head first into the gaping blackness. One by one the other captives were also thrown down into the darkness below. Their task completed, the Red Guards left, leaving all to die.
An advancing White Army recovered her body months later. Eventually it was taken to the church on the Mount of Olives where she had come as a pilgrim some 30 years previously. It is there, facing the Holy City, with her earthly journey now over, that she awaits the advance of another, heavenly, army, who shall come to claim her.
Just over 70 years after Ella’s death across the now defunct Soviet Union, jubilant crowds watched as statues of Lenin were pulled down. And as a new dawn broke for Russia, it revealed, standing once more in the heart of Moscow, the memorial of Ella to her husband, Sergei, latterly re-erected: that Cross no longer now just a symbol to human love, but one of fidelity to Divine Love.
The Martyrdom of ‘the Most Beautiful Woman in Europe’