Walter Ciszek

 Walter Ciszek

Walter Ciszek was born on November 4, 1904 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, USA.

He became a Jesuit Priest in 1928 and later Volunteered to become a Missionary in the Soviet Union.

Since the October 1917 Communist Revolution Christians were being openly persecuted there, and few Believers had access to a Priest.

 Pope Pius XI made an appeal to Priests from around the world to go to Russia as Missionaries.

In 1934, Ciszek was sent to Rome to study Theology, Russian, the History of Russia and Liturgy at the Pontifical Russian College (or 'Russicum'), a Jesuit-run Seminary established to train Priests of the Russian Greek Catholic Church for Missionary work in the Soviet Union and the Russian Diaspora.

In 1937, Ciszek was ordained a Priest in the Byzantine Rite in Rome and took the name Vladimir.

In 1938, Ciszek was sent to the Jesuit Mission in Albertyn in eastern Poland.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland and forced him to close his Mission.

Arriving in Lviv, he realized that it would be easy for a Priest to enter the Soviet Union amid the streams of Exiles going east.

After securing the permission of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, he crossed the border in 1940 under the assumed identity of Władymyr Łypynski. With two of his fellow Jesuits, he traveled 1,500 miles by train to the logging town of Chusovoy, in the Ural Mountains.

For one year, he worked as an unskilled Logger while discreetly performing Religious Ministry.

Ciszek was arrested in 1941 under false accusations of Espionage for Nazi Germany and the Vatican.

To his shock, the NKVD (the USSR's Secret Police) already knew his Real Name and that he was an American Citizen and a Catholic Priest.

He was then sent to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, the NKVD's National Headquarters.

In 1942 he was sentenced to 15 years of Hard Labor in a Gulag.

Ciszek was to remain in Lubyanka for 4 more years.

In 1946, he was sent by train to Krasnoyarsk then 20 days by boat north on the Yenisei River until reaching 300 miles above the Arctic Circle at the city of Norilsk, the center of the Labor Camp Complex known as Norillag.

There, Ciszek was forced to load coal onto freighter vessels and later transferred to working in coal mines located in the permafrost.

 A year later, he was sent to work on the construction of a nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, and palladium ore refinery.

From 1953 to 1955, he worked in mines.

Throughout his lengthy imprisonment, Ciszek continued to pray, to offer both the Tridentine Mass and the Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy, to hear Confessions, conduct retreats and perform secret and illegal Parish Ministry.

On April 22, 1955, Ciszek's sentence was complete, and he was released with the restriction to live only in the city of Norilsk.

Until he was allowed to write to the US in 1955, he was presumed dead by both his Family and the Society of Jesus.

After setting up a Catholic Parish in Norilsk, Ciszek was ordered by the KGB in 1958 to move to Krasnoyarsk, where he secretly established several nearby Mission Parishes.

After the KGB learned of this, he was forcibly transferred to Abakan, 99 miles to the south, where he worked as an Automobile Mechanic for four more years.

In 1963, he received a letter from his Sisters in the US.

(Fr. Ciszek’s arrival in New York in 1963.)

After nearly 23 years of Imprisonment, Ciszek was released with American Student Marvin Makinen on October 12, 1963. In exchange, the Soviets received GRU Agents Ivan Dmitrievich Egorov and his Wife Alexandra Egorova, whom the FBI had arrested for Espionage in July 1963.

Ciszek was not aware that two US Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, had both been demanding his repatriation since the arrival of his first letter to his Sisters in 1955.

In 1965, Ciszek began working and Lecturing at the John XXIII Center at Fordham University (now the Center for Eastern Christian Studies at the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania.)

He published two Memoirs: “With God in Russia” (1964) and “He Leadeth Me” (1973.)

On December 8, 1984, Ciszek died after many years of declining health and was buried at the Jesuit Cemetery in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. He was 80 years old.

At least 5,000 American Citizens found themselves in Soviet-Occupied or Controlled Territory at the end of World War 2 (in the USSR, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Bulgaria, parts of Austria and Yugoslavia.)

2,000 of these American Citizens were held in Soviet Gulags and Prisons until the USSR collapsed in 1991.