Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
In 1975, Brigadier Josef Korbel of The Salvation Army came to Marshalltown, Iowa, for Evangelistic meetings.
Korbel, born in Czechoslovakia in 1907, survived a Communist concentration camp for 10 years. I was a senior in high school and deeply impacted by his message of God’s grace as he faced the cruelty of brutality and hunger.
On Nov. 25, 1925, he met The Salvation Army at an “Open Air” meeting and followed them back to their hall where he made a profession of Jesus Christ as His Lord and Savior. He met his wife Erna after Salvation Army Training College and they continued in the ministry and had three children.
The Salvation Army barely survived German occupation between 1938 and 1945. The Communists took over Czechoslovakia after the war and immediately started banning Christian activity.
Josef was arrested in 1949 noting that he was “a very dangerous man for his strong religious influence, specifically on young people and children.” He was sentenced to 12 years of confinement and hard labor for his faith. He ended up serving 10 years being released in 1959. Erna and his children endured unspeakable discrimination during those years. His younger son was shot and killed for seeking permission to attend a Good Friday service. His older son was imprisoned for lack of support for the regime. In 1967, his son was released and The Salvation Army moved the Korbels to Switzerland as the Soviets were invading.
In 1971, Josef and Erna were moved to the United States where they became evangelists in the central territory of The Salvation Army.
The Korbels also held meetings in Warsaw. Erna died in 1980 and Josef moved to Denver, Colo., still travelling to share his story and the good news of Jesus.
I was eating a meal with him and asked, “Brigadier, what is your favorite scripture verse?” He responded with Romans 8:35-39, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’”
He and his wife came face to face with Nazism, Communism, atheism, terror and suffering but managed to keep their faith in Christ. Josef was “promoted to glory” on July 4, 2002, and oh how he loved the United States! He also said, “They put me in prison but they couldn’t separate me from God! They can kill the body but not the soul! Our hope is in Jesus alone!”
Ken Locke is the retired corps administrator of The Salvation Army in Warsaw and director of the Greater Warsaw Ministerial Association. Have ideas for this column? Go to www.gwma.info.
