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From the Back Cover Captured by the Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a 'Vatican spy', American Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. He here recalls how it was only through an utter reliance on God's will that he managed to endure. He tells of the courage he found in prayer - a courage that eased the loneliness, the pain, the frustrations, the anguish, the fears, the despair. For, as Ciszek relates, the solace of spiritual contemplation gave him an inner serenity upon which he was able to draw amid the 'arrogance of evil' that surrounded him. Learning to accept even the inhuman work of toiling in the infamous Siberian gulags as a labor pleasing to God, he was able to turn the adverse forces of circumstance into a source of positive value and a means of drawing closer to the compassionate and never-forsaking Divine Spirit. Read more About the Author WALTER J. CISZEK, S.J. (1904-1984), was a Polish-American Jesuit priest known for his missionary work in the Soviet Union during and after World War II. He was eventually arrested by the Soviets as a spy and spent fifteen years in the Gulag. He was released and returned to the United States in 1963, after which he wrote two books, including the memoir With God in Russia, and served as a spiritual director. Since 1990, Ciszek has been under investigation by the Roman Catholic Church for anonization. His current title is Servant of God. Read more Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. {1}� AlbertynThe Red Army is here. They�ve taken the town. The Soviets are here.� The news spread like panic through the small village of Albertyn, Poland, on October 17, 1939. I had just finished Mass and breakfast on that memorable morning, when bewildered parishionerscame to the mission to tell me the news. It was news we had feared ever since it had become clear that Germany and Russia were dividing up Poland. But now our fears were a reality. The Red Army was in Albertyn. � One by one the parishioners came crowding to the mission to ask my opinion, to seek my advice, looking for a word of hope or consolation. They were worried about their families. They were worried about their sons in the Polish Army, or their husbands inthe government. They were worried about their children and what would happen to them all. I tried to be reassuring, but what could I really say? I had no answers to their immediate questions of fact, and how could I reassure them about the future or comfortthem in the midst of the turmoil that had overtaken the town? What could I tell them except to pray and to trust in God? � Even in that I felt foolish. I had been with them a little more than a year; I had been ordained a little more than two years. How inexperienced and immature I felt at this sudden crisis of such proportions. Supported by the routines of a parish priest,I had ministered to these people in their daily problems, helped them, consoled them, said Mass and brought Communion to the sick, anointed the dying. I had made many friends among them, and they trusted me, young as I was��the young American in their midst.But the war changed everything. The crises they faced now were not family quarrels or sickness or the loss of a loved one. The advice they wanted now was not about things common to every parish and learned by every priest. Suddenly, our whole world, theirsand mine, had changed. � It is impossible to describe the feeling that comes over you at such a time. The feeling that somehow, in an instant of time, everything is changed and nothing again will ever be quite the same. That tomorrow will never again be like yesterday. That thevery trees, the grass, the air, the daylight are no longer the same, for the world has changed. It is a feeling impossible to describe, and yet one that every wife who has lost a husband knows well, one that every child who has tasted evil for the first timeor faced a sudden crisis has experienced. It is that feeling that leaves the heart saying, �Oh, if only I could turn back the clock to before it happened, if only it had never happened, if only I had it to do over again.� � My fears were vague that morning, though the feeling of inadequacy was very real. And the fears themselves quickly ceased to be vague and became quite real in turn. Arrests soon followed the arrival of the Red Army. Property was confiscated. There werecountless interrogations, threats, and intimidations, as the Communists endeavored to round up everyone they considered a threat to them or to their new order. � In all this, the Church itself became a special target for attack. The Oriental rite church at our mission was closed immediately; the Latin rite parish was allowed to function for a while for those few families who dared to attend. The rest of our missionbuildings were taken over by the Red Army and used to quarter troops. A propaganda campaign was mounted against the Church and against the priests; we labored under a campaign of constant harassment and incidents large and small. And it was effective. Eventhe most faithful became cautious about visiting the church or seeing a priest. Young people dropped away quickly. Workers soon learned they could lose their jobs if they insisted upon attending religious services. Our activity as priests was limited strictlyto the church; we could not go to the people unless they came to us. Few of them dared to do so. Soon our ministry consisted solely of saying Mass on Sunday for a few old people. The Jesuit mission, which had flourished for ten years in Albertyn, was destroyedin a matter of weeks. � Again and again, as I watched all this happen, I had to force myself not to think of the question that kept returning unbidden to mind: �Why has God allowed this evil to happen?� Why persecutions? If God must allow natural disasters, or even wars becauseof human failings, why can�t he at least allow his flock to be shepherded and comforted during such calamities? Surely he could defend and protect his flock instead of having it singled out for special attack such as this. The perplexity and pain grew withinme as I saw the visible Church, once strong and organized, dissolve under the attacks of these invaders and watched the people grow estranged, pressured ceaselessly into accepting this new order. And what of the young people who were literally torn away fromtheir parents and forced to join the Young Pioneers or Komsomol organizations, taught to report on any �deviations� of the old people at home? How frustrating it was to hear the Church and priests and religious openly slandered in Communist propaganda, andto know that the children had to learn and repeat atheist doctrines every day in school and in their classwork. How could God allow all this? And why? � I did not blame the people. I knew they had not lost their faith but were just afraid right now to practice it openly. They came to me at night to ask how they should conduct themselves, to ask whether it was wrong to cooperate with the new order, to askif they should let their children join the Komsomol organizations, or whether they themselves should join the labor unions. And finally, they came to ask whether, under the circumstances, it was wrong not to come to church on Sundays or feast days. And whatcould I tell them? How much heroism could I ask of them? How much did God, who had allowed all this to happen, expect of these simple, ordinary people of the backwoods of Albertyn? � It was agony for me as a priest to ask these questions, but it was impossible not to ask them. They crowded to mind in times of prayer, they came at Mass, they came all through the days and nights. And I�m sure they came not to me alone. It was not a crisisof faith, any more than it is for anyone who has ever suffered a great loss or faced a family tragedy and asked himself the same questions. It was rather a crisis of understanding, and no one need be ashamed to admit he has been troubled by it. Anyone who hasdone much reading in the Old Testament is familiar with those questions. �How long, O Lord, how long will you allow our enemies to triumph over us?� Most especially in the days after David, in the ages of captivity, when the glories of the golden age of Solomonwere but a memory by the rivers of Babylon and Israel had been broken and led away in shame, does the question recur again and again. To Israel, surely, it must have seemed the end of the world, the end of the covenant, the end of God�s special care for hischosen people. � Yet, from our vantage point in history, we know it was really quite the opposite. Israel�s troubles were in truth a manifestation of Yahweh�s special providence, his special love for his chosen people. Like a fond and loving father, he was trying to weanthem away from trust in kings or princes or in armies or the powers of this world. He was trying to teach them, again and again, that their faith must only be in him alone. He was leading them, through every trial and in every age, to the realization that Godalone is faithful in all tribulations, that he alone is constant in his love and must be clung to, even when it seems all else has been turned upside down. Yahweh is still the Lord behind the events and happenings of this world; he can be found there, and hemust be sought in them, so that his will may be done. It was he who had chosen them, not they him. It was he who had first made the covenant with them, who had led them and cared for them, shepherded and fed and guarded them in every tribulation. Their partin the covenant must be to trust in him alone, to remain always faithful, to look to him and not to other gods, to rely on him and not on rulers or on chariots or bowmen. He was ever faithful, and so in turn must they be, even when he led them where they wouldnot go, into a land they knew not, or into exile. For he had chosen them, they were his people, he would no more forget them than a mother could forget the child of her womb��yet neither, in their turn, must they ever forget him. � This is a hard lesson. And the Old Testament is a chronicle of the many times and the many ways God tried to teach that lesson to his chosen people. And it is a record, too, of how very often, in times of peace and prosperity, Israel came to take Yahwehfor granted, to settle down in some routine and to accept the status quo as the be-�all and the end-�all, to think of the established order as their support and sustenance, and to forget their ultimate goal and destiny as the people of the covenant. Then Yahwehwould have to remind them again, by the downfall of the monarchy or by exile or the destruction of Jerusalem, that he alone must be their ultimate hope, their sole source of support, for he had chosen them out of all the people of the world to be a sign ofhis power and his love, and they must testify to him before all the world by the witness of their trust in him alone. � That same lesson each of us must learn, difficult or not. How easy it is, in times of ease, for us to become dependent on our routines, on the established order of our day-�to-�day existence, to carry us along. We begin to take things for granted, to relyon ourselves and on our own resources, to �settle in� in this world and look to it for our support. We all too easily come to equate being comfortable with a sense of well-�being, to seek our comfort solely in the sense of being comfortable. Friends and possessionssurround us, one day is followed by the next, good health and happiness for the most part are ours. We don�t have to desire much of the things of this world�to be enamored of riches, for example, or greedy or avaricious��in order to have gained this senseof comfort and of well-�being, to trust in them as our support��and to take God for granted. It is the status quo that we rely on, that carries us from day to day, and somehow we begin to lose sight of the fact that under all these things and behind all thesethings, it is God who supports and sustains us. We go along, taking for granted that tomorrow will be very much like today, comfortable in the world we have created for ourselves, secure in the established order we have learned to live with, however imperfectit may be, and give little thought to God at all. � Somehow, then, God must contrive to break through those routines of ours and remind us once again, like Israel, that we are ultimately dependent only upon him, that he has made us and destined us for life with him through all eternity, that the thingsof this world and this world itself are not our lasting city, that his we are and that we must look to him and turn to him in everything. Then it is, perhaps, that he must allow our whole world to be turned upside down in order to remind us it is not our permanentabode or final destiny, to bring us to our senses and restore our sense of values, to turn our thoughts once more to him��even if at first our thoughts are questioning and full of reproaches. Then it is that he must remind us again, with terrible clarity, thathe meant exactly what he said in those seemingly simple words of the Sermon on the Mount: �Do not be anxious about what you shall eat, or what you shall wear, or where you shall sleep, but seek first the kingdom of God and his justice.� � So it was with the people of Israel, who must learn not to put their trust in princes or in kingdoms but to be faithful only to Yahweh as he was ever faithful to them, and to put all their trust in him. So it has been throughout the history of the NewTestament. There have been changes and upheavals in the Church herself, there have been persecutions. It is not princes or rulers, structures or organizations, that sustain the Church. It is God who sustains her. So must it be in Albertyn. God is constant inhis love if we will but look to him, he will sustain us in every storm if we will but cry out to him, he will save us if we will but reach out our hand to him. He is there, if we will only turn to him and learn to trust in him alone. The upheavals in this world,or in the Church herself, are not the end of everything, especially of his love. They can in fact serve best as signs to remind us of his love and of his constancy, to make us turn once more to him and cling to him again when all else that we counted on isoverturned around us. � And so it is in each of our lives. It is a sad commentary on our human frailty that we fail to think of God or see him behind the comfortable routines of our day-�to-�day existence. It is only in a crisis that we remember him and turn to him, often asquerulous and questioning children. It is in moments of loss or family tragedy or personal despair that men turn to him and ask, �Why?���indeed are almost forced to turn to him, again and at last, for help and for support and consolation. Mysteriously, Godin his providence must make use of our tragedies to remind our fallen human nature of his presence and his love, of the constancy of his concern and care for us. It is not vindictiveness on his part; he does not send us tragedies to punish us for having solong forgotten him. The failing is on our part. He is always present and ever faithful; it is we who fail to see him or to look for him in times of ease and comfort, to remember he is there, shepherding and guarding and providing us the very things we cometo count on and expect to sustain us every day. Yet we fail to remember that, comfortable as we are in our established order and the status quo, as day follows day. � So it was in Albertyn, as the war tore apart the fabric of our once peaceful lives, my own included, that I came to understand more clearly and in some small way this truth in all its terrible simplicity: �Do not be anxious, therefore, saying what shallwe eat or what shall we wear, or where shall we sleep, for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice.� We would survive, although the world around us had changed completely. We would go on, todayand tomorrow and the next day, picking up the pieces and working out each day our eternal destiny and our salvation. There would be a tomorrow, and we would have to live in it��and God would be there as well. The Church would survive, perhaps not exactly aswe had known it at the mission, because the faith would survive among the people of God as it had always survived in times of persecution. One thing only need be of great concern to us in all this seeming upheaval and catastrophe: to be faithful to God andto look to him in everything, confident of his love and his constancy, aware that this world and this new order was not our lasting city any more than the previous one had been, and striving always to know his will and to do it each day of our lives. Read more
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