Walter Ciszek

(November 4, 1904 – December 8, 1984) was a Polish-American Jesuit priest of the Russian Greek Catholic Church who clandestinely conducted missionary work in the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1963.

Fifteen of these years were spent in confinement and hard labor in the Gulag, plus five preceding them[1] in Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison.

He was released and returned to the United States in 1963, after which he wrote two books, He Leadeth Me and the memoir With God in Russia, and served as a spiritual director.

His fellow Russicum seminarians included Alexander Kurtna, a convert from Estonian Orthodoxy whom Ciszek referred to in his memoirs only by the codename "Misha".

[vague] Kurtna, who was loyal to the USSR, started spying for Nazi Germany in 1943 because his handler and Obersturmbannführer of the SS, Herbert Kappler, threatened to send him and his wife to a concentration camp.

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

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.

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

His memoirs provide a vivid description of the Norilsk uprising, which started at Gorlag spread through Norillag in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin's death.

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.

[8] 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 exchange, the Soviets received GRU agents Ivan Dmitrievich Egorov and his wife Alexandra Egorova, whom the FBI had arrested for espionage in July 1963.

According to Constantin Simon, S.J., With God in Russia, Ciszek's memoir of his decades in the USSR, went through multiple editions in various languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, and Slovak.