Walter J. Ciszek - He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

Copyright 1973 by Walter J. Ciszek

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
www.crownpublishing.com

IMAGE is a registered trademark and the I colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by
Doubleday, New York, in 1973 and subsequently published in paperback in the United States by Ignatius Press, San Francisco, in 1995.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

ISBN 978-0-8041-4152-9
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-81872-0

Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright

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The Lords my shepherd, Ill not want

He makes me down to lie

In pastures green He leadeth me

The quiet waters by.

Yea, though I walk through deaths valley

Yet will I fear no ill,

For Thou art with me and Thy rod

And staff me comfort still.

To my Russian friends,
Nikolai
Andrei
Ivan
Albert
Giorgi
Vladimir
Katia
Victor
Yekaterina

May He lead them as He led me.

And to my sister Helen Gearhart
and my dear friend Father Edward McCawley, S.J.,
whom He already leads.

On October 12, 1963, I landed at New Yorks Idlewild Airport after having spent twenty-three years in the Soviet Union and most of that time in prison or the slave labor camps of Siberia. Some of my friends and family on hand that day said that I stepped off BOAC flight no. 501 like some new Columbus, about to rediscover America and take up again the life of a free man. I felt nothing of that. Nor did I know that I had officially been listed as dead since 1947 and that my Jesuit colleagues had said Masses for the repose of my soul when it was thought I had died in a Soviet prison. I felt only a simple sense of gratitude to God for having sustained me through those years and, in his providence, bringing me home again at last.

It was shortly after I left home and family in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, to join the Jesuits in 1928 that I first volunteered for the Russian missions. Pope Pius XI wrote a letter in 1929 to all seminarians, especially our Jesuit sons, asking for men to enter a new Russian center being started at Rome to prepare young clerics for possible future work in Russia. I studied my theology there and learned to say Mass in the Byzantine rite in preparation for work in Russia. But after I was ordained, there was no way to send priests into Russia, so I was assigned instead to an Oriental rite mission staffed by Jesuits in Albertyn, Poland.

I was working there when war broke out in September 1939. The German Army took Warsaw, but the Red Army overran eastern Poland and Albertyn. In the confusion and aftermath of these invasions, I followed many Polish refugees into Russia. Disguised as a worker, I accompanied them in the hope of being able to minister to their spiritual needs. But I didnt fool the Soviet secret police. As soon as Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, I was picked up by the NKVD and put into prison.

I was taken by train to the dread Lubianka Prison in Moscow for interrogation as a Vatican spy. I remained there all through the war years, undergoing periodic and often intense questioning by the NKVD. Then, after five years, I was sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor in the prison camps of Siberia. Along with thousands of others, I was put to work in labor brigades doing outdoor construction in the extreme arctic cold, or in coal and copper mines, ill clothed, ill fed, and poorly housed in the timber barracks surrounded by barbed wire and a death zone. Men died in those camps, especially those who gave up hope. But I trusted in God, never felt abandoned or without hope, and survived along with many others. I never looked on my survival as anything special or extraordinary, but I did give thanks to God for sustaining and preserving me through those years.

When my term at last ran out, I was not completely free. Because I had been convicted on a charge of espionage, I could not leave Siberia and return to the main cities of Russia, let alone leave the country. So I remained in the villages and towns of Siberia, working as an auto mechanic among other things, until I was finally exchanged in 1963 for two convicted Russian spies, thanks to the efforts of family and friends and the good offices of the U.S. State Department. Upon my arrival, my religious superiors and a number of publishers convinced me that there was a great deal of public interest in the story of my years inside the Soviet Union, those years when I had actually been given up for dead. So I agreed to tell that story and did so in the book With God in Russia.

Yet, to be perfectly honest, that was not the book I wanted to write. I felt that I had learned much during those years of hardship and suffering that could be of help to others in their lives. For every mans life contains its share of suffering; each of us is occasionally driven almost to despair, to ask why God allows evil and suffering to overtake him or those he loves. I had seen a great deal of suffering in the camps and the prisons in those around me, had almost despaired myself, and had learned in those darkest of hours to turn to God for consolation and to trust in him alone.

How did you manage to survive? is the question most often asked me by newsmen and others ever since my return home. My answer has always been the same: Gods providence. Yet I knew that simple statement could never satisfy the questioner or ever begin to convey all I meant by it. Through the long years of isolation and suffering, God had led me to an understanding of life and his love that only those who have experienced it can fathom. He had stripped away from me many of the external consolations, physical and religious, that men rely on and had left me with a core of seemingly simple truths to guide me. And yet what a profound difference they had made in my life, what strength they gave me, what courage to go on! I wanted to tell others about themindeed, I felt one reason that God in his providence had brought me safely home was so that I might help others understand these truths a little better.

So, even in the pages of that first book, With God in Russia, I tried to say something of what I had learned and felt I must say, to give some hint at least of the truths that had guided and sustained me. I knew I had not done it adequately or properly within the limitations of those pages, but I was consoled by the many letters and personal requests for spiritual guidance I received, which indicated that somehow readers of that story had read far more between the lines than I had been able to say. I knew then that I must someday write this book.

I also knew, though, that I could not do it alone. Strong as the motivations were that compelled me to write it, strong as were my desires, I knew only too well that my limited talents as a writer were inadequate to the task. I never considered myself a writer, and I never will. Yet the idea of the message I had to communicate and share with others was so strong within me that, after two years of hesitation, I turned once more to Father Daniel L. Flaherty, S.J., who had been such a help to me in producing the first book, and explained to him my ideas and my dreams for this book. To me he is more than a collaborator or excellent editor; in the few brief years I have known him and worked with him, he has become one of my closest friends, almost a part of my soul. If he had said no, I think I would have abandoned there and then any idea of further writing once and for all. But he didnt say no. He agreed to help me again, and his encouragement fostered my enthusiasm to push ahead.