By Jon BrownChristian Post Reporter Tuesday, April 23, 2024

A Christian woman who survived a communist concentration camp in Eastern Europe recently explained how she is making preparations to die in a US prison after being charged by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) for protesting at abortion clinics.

Eva Edl, 88, was among the 11 protesters the Biden DOJ slapped with charges for allegedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) when they protested outside the Carafem Health Center Clinic near Nashville on 15 an of March 2021.

In October 2022, the DOJ accused them of intimidation and interference “with clinic employees and a patient who sought reproductive health services” at the clinic. Federal judge found her and four others guilty earlier this month, and she is awaiting sentencing on July 30.

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Edl also faces charges stemming from an August 2020 protest at an abortion clinic in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and an April 2021 protest at a clinic in Saginaw, Michigan. Collectively, Edl could face 11 years in prison and $350,000 in fines.

Edl said The Daily Signal that she is already resigned to the possibility that she will be imprisoned for the rest of her life for her protests, during which she and others tried to dissuade women from going through with their planned abortions.

“When I was charged, I started preparing to die there,” she said. “Right now, I'm ambivalent. … I'm doing my best to prepare. I haven't talked to a funeral director yet.”

“I'm just being sensible,” she added. “There's no guarantee I survive it.”

Edl further warned that the US government is becoming more and more like the communist regime her family escaped, recalling to the outlet how she was just 9 years old when she and her family were taken in cattle cars to the Gakovo concentration camp in what was then Yugoslavia .

Edl's family were Danube Swabians, a German-speaking ethnic group in Yugoslavia that was targeted for extermination after the Second World War by Josip Broz, the communist president of the country.

“We were packed body to body, and being a small child, I could hardly breathe,” she recalled. “We had no food, no water.” She added that her mother found it unimaginable that the government would pursue them until that happened, which she suggested should be a cautionary tale for Americans today.

According to her website, Edl was rescued by Gakovo, escaped to Austria and eventually wound up in the United States, where she became involved in the pro-life movement after learning about what she described as America's “death camps.” She has been arrested 46 times since the 1980s for her protests at abortion clinics, which she said never involved violence.

She recalled that she was even arrested at the behest of former Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., when she went to his office in the 1990s to complain about his support for the FACE Act, the repeal of which some Republicans had recently been ; calling amid the growing number of pro-life activists being indicted under it during the Biden presidency.

Edl's vivid memories of being rounded up and transported to Gakovo for extermination fueled her protests and steeled her against her arrests, she told The Daily Signal. She compared the situation to her fellow Yugoslavs who allowed their fear to stop them from doing everything they could to stand in the way of a wicked government doing evil.

“What if citizens of my country had overcome their fear, and some of them stood on those railroad tracks between the gate of the entrance to the death camp and the train?” she said. “The train should have stopped. And while the guards of those trains would have been busy surrounding those who were in front of the train, another group could have come in, opened our cattle car and maybe freed us, but no one. did.”

She noted that some wept openly as the cattle cars carrying the victims rumbled along the train tracks to the concentration camp, but their tears proved ultimately useless as no one actually took a stand.

“So when we put our bodies between the woman and the clinic, we buy time to give our sidewalk counselors the opportunity to talk to women, and hopefully open their hearts with love for their babies and let their babies live,” she said of . the goals of the tactics that she and others take when they protest.

“I feel very strongly, because of my background, that human life is sacred,” Edl said. “Government does not have the authority to permit what God forbids. And murder is forbidden by God.”

Former President Donald Trump mentioned Edl's case during a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters 2024 International Christian Media Convention in Nashville in February.

Trump presented the treatment of Edl and the other defendants in Tennessee as an example of Biden's DOJ exposing communist tactics targeting Christians, even as they leave the southern border wide open while allowing many criminals to break the law with impunity.

“This is a communist state, just so you understand,” Trump said. “This is the beginning of a communist state, is it [my indictments] or any of a thousand other things that happen. This is the only way they will be able to stay in office because they are running such an incompetent regime. No one has ever seen anything like it.”