In 1951 the communist government of Czechoslovakia sent a young medical doctor to prison for refusing to repudiate his faith. There he experienced solitary confinement, brainwashing and torture for seven years. Since he was trained in psychology, Dr. Krcméry was able to recognize the strategies used against him. Ultimately, what saved him from total physical and mental collapse was the Gospel of John which he had memorized before imprisonment and then turned to again and again. In a supreme act of generosity Silvester Krcméry has opted to recall the horrors of that time in order to give us this singular account of the scientic and spiritual basis of brainwashing. “When the annals of the twentieth century are complete, one of its many great heroes-distinguished both by the purity of his mind and by the intensity of his suffering-will be the author of this book…Indeed, when many years later Silvo was able to recount to Pope John Paul II in some detail what he experienced in the attempts to brainwash him, and how he deflected them, the Pope was fascinated to learn more about the frequent sense of ‘weightlessness’ that Silvo sometimes experienced for days at a time, particularly when he was gripped by the words of St. John. Readers, I am certain, will strike them with awe at the human capacity to endure…By his witness Silvo has lifted up the entire human race…No one who reads it will leave it quite the same as when he first opened it.” —Michael Novak, From the foreword