With God in Russia

By Walter Ciszek

Father Walter Ciszek, S.J., author of the best-selling He Leadeth Me, tells here the gripping, astounding story of his twenty-three years in Russian prison camps in Siberia, how he was falsely imprisoned as an "American spy", the incredible rigors of daily life as a prisoner, and his extraordinary faith in God and commitment to his priestly vows and vocation. He said Mass under cover, in constant danger of death. He heard confession of hundreds who could have betrayed him; he aided spiritually many who could have gained by exposing him.

This is a remarkable story of personal experience. It would be difficult to write fiction that could honestly portray the heroic patience, endurance, fortitude and complete trust in God lived by Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2009
• ISBN: 9781681496337

Book preview

FOREWORD

In the pages that follow, you will read what might seem to be a strange and remarkable piece of fiction. But it is not fiction. Rather, it is a true story, recorded on one of the proudest pages of contemporary Jesuit history.

Somewhat in the role of an Evangelist, I have the privilege of telling you how that story ended. I was there, and it isn’t often one gets the chance to be around when a man comes back from the dead. I can also tell something of how that story began. Then I must leave it to these pages themselves to unroll the complete record of the hidden years behind the Iron Curtain and to suggest, perhaps, that a new chapter has yet to be written.

The story began in 1939—a long, complicated, almost incredible tale that ran its course through an entire generation of the lives of the older ones among us.

While this tale was unfolding on the other side of the earth, millions died, a great war was fought, the hydrogen bomb was invented, men began orbiting the earth, babies were born and grew up and married, and four Popes sat on the chair of the Fisherman.

It was my great good fortune to know the central figure of this story some six or seven years before it all began. We were together in the chapel, along the corridors, on the paths that wound around the house where we both took our first vows as Jesuits, on a hilltop in the rolling Pennsylvania Dutch country just west of Reading, Pennsylvania.

I knew him in those far-off days as a trim young athlete, a promising linguist, unsparing in his work, quiet but outgoing in disposition, a young Jesuit unmistakably alight with the ideals of the Society. I remember, too, that he was always able to get things going again when they broke down.

Thirty-odd years ago, my friend went down that hill one June day, and I stayed behind. We never met again until. . .

My telephone rang about 3:45 on the afternoon of October 11, 1963.

The voice on the other end of the wire was that of an old teacher and friend, our former Provincial, Fr. John McMahon, calling from Auriesville, New York. Fr. McMahon had just heard from Fr. John Daley, the Provincial of Maryland, who was visiting Auriesville at the time, that at four o’clock that afternoon the State Department was going to release to the press an extraordinary piece of news.

In exchange for two Russian agents who had been apprehended in this country, the Soviet Union had decided to repatriate two American citizens held for some time in Soviet prisons. That very afternoon the two Americans were about to enplane in London for New York’s Idlewild International Airport.

Fr. McMahon thoughtfully wanted America to get a scoop on this story of a generation.

And it really was the story of a generation. It was the story of that very same intrepid young Jesuit who had left our Wernersville novitiate in 1932 to continue—at Woodstock, then later in Rome—his studies for ordination to the priesthood in the Russian rite; who went into Poland as a parish priest in 1939; who was then engulfed in the great wave of World War II; and who—when the wave ebbed back eastward—was sucked into the terra incognita of the Soviet Union and heard from no more.

We thought of all this next morning, October 12, as we prepared to meet him at Idlewild.

We said our Masses for him at 4:30 that morning in the chapel at Campion House, home of the America staff. Afterward, I drove to the airport in the predawn twilight with Frs. Robert Graham and Eugene Culhane of our staff.

As we drove past the eerie shadows of the World Fair’s strange new unfinished structures, someone recalled the last postal card that had come from Poland in 1940—followed by an interminable silence.

Another remembered that in 1947 it had been presumed he was dead, and we had offered the customary Masses of the Society for a deceased brother-in-arms when his name had been printed in the official roster of the Society’s departed sons.

We drove on, as we relived again the day when, all of a sudden, and out of the nowhere of northern Siberia, a letter had come—the handwriting looked right enough—then another letter, and later still more.

There had been a request for a suit and for a heavy coat, for a pair of shoes. Another request had come for a set of books.

These letters had all been signed with our friend’s name.

We were almost at Idlewild. We wondered: Would it really be he? Could it be someone else who had claimed his name or stolen his papers?

What would he be like, if it were he, when he came down the steps of the plane? What would the years in Siberia, where he had worked so long in the mines, have done to him?

Would he know us? Would he still speak English? Would he be sick in body or in mind?

BOAC flight no. 501 from London was on time. Right on the dot of 6:55 A.M., the big plane trundled up to a stop on the asphalt apron. With the parents of the young man, Marvin Makinen, who was being released along with our friend, we stood there—eyes popping—as the steps were wheeled up to the plane and the plane’s door opened.

The two returned prisoners were the first ones off. Down the steps they came in a rush—a tall, sunken-cheeked lad of twenty-four, an American Fulbright student arrested on a charge of espionage in the Soviet Union two years earlier; then a short, stocky, full-faced, gray-haired man in his later fifties. The older man wore a forest-green overcoat over a gray suit and a deep blue shirt. Onto his head, as he stepped off the plane, he put a big, floppy brimmed, purple-black Russian felt hat.

It all happened in two winks of your eye.

The two returnees stepped almost automatically into stride with the cordon of New York City policemen who immediately shaped up around them, and they began briskly marching off, like seasoned prisoners, to the Immigration Office.

I thought for a moment that the hefty Russian man must be—he looked for all the world as though he were!—a member of some visiting delegation of Soviet farmers or technicians.

Then we realized. He was marching past us in lock step with the police before it dawned on us. And he had marched off into the Customs Office before it really dawned on him that he was home again, that these were his sisters there to meet him along with a delegation of old Jesuit comrades of twenty-five or thirty years ago.

I refrain from saying anything of those indescribable first moments of meeting and recognition between him and his family. Even the eloquence of Gabe Pressman was not able to persuade State Department officials to allow photographers in to snap the scene.

Yet there are so many memories of that October morning: the hurly-burly in the newsroom, where five movie cameras and forty still photographers jostled our friend under the klieg lights.

Later, there was that long talk at the America residence, when he first began to tell his sisters and his fellow Jesuits about those years in Russia and ended by emptying out his pockets to show that he still had a few Russian rubles and seventy-four kopecks in change after buying tea in the Moscow airport.

After Mass, when we sat down to an American breakfast of bacon and eggs, he gave the blessing in Polish. He said the last time he had sat around a table with friends was four days before, when his beloved people of Abakan gave him a memorable Siberian going-away party.

I also recall his telling that he had never had a single day’s illness in all those years.

. . . and how he had always somehow been able to continue his priestly work—sometimes celebrating Mass from memory over his suitcase in the barrack where he lived or, at other times, in the depths of the forest on the stump of a tree.

I recall he said he never doubted his powers and his duties as a priest. He never questioned the faith into which he had been baptized and ordained another Christ.

One doesn’t, as I said, often have the opportunity to be there when a man comes back from the dead. We Jesuit companions of his were so privileged on the morning of October 12, when our old friend, like some new Columbus, flew in on BOAC flight no. 501 to rediscover America and to take up again the life of a free man.

Those of you who read this book will have that rare privilege, too—to share the experiences of a man returned from the valley of the shadow of death.

He has come back to us from the mines and prison camps of Siberia—his hair nearly white, his hands gnarled from labor as a miner and mechanic, but unbroken, not brainwashed, and with a heart filled with compassion for the people to whom his whole adult life as a priest has been consecrated.

He will have our praise, assuredly, but he does not ask for our praise.

He asks only that we try to grasp the meaning of what, with God’s grace, he has endured—the meaning of a life lived as a witness that the love of Christ knows no frontiers.

So his story ended. Or did it? Indeed, will it ever end? For it will be told and retold for generations along the long black lines of Jesuits. Somewhere, today—at Poughkeepsie or Wer-nersville or Woodstock in the halls he walked, in the Midwest or the South or the Far West, in Rome or Canada or England or India or Australia or Japan—there are fresh recruits awaiting the day when they will have their chance to write their chapter of the story that only begins with Fr. Walter Ciszek.

In reading what follows, give or take a word here or there. Go back in history nearly four hundred years. Change the word Tyburn to Lubianka. For the addressee, Elizabeth, substitute the current Russian premier. For English students substitute men of the free world.

Then, as you read this story of Fr. Walter Ciszek, recall Blessed Edmund Campion and the conclusion of that eloquent document of faith called Campion’s Brag, written almost four hundred years ago to Her Majesty of England . . .

Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posteritie shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes.

  And touching our Societie, be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned; the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted; so it must be restored.

THURSTON N. DAVIS,S.J.

editor-in-chief,

America magazine

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Only on my arrival in America did I become fully aware of the many people whose generous efforts went into effecting my return. In the first place, I find I owe a great debt of gratitude to Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, and their White House staffs, as also to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for the concern they showed over my case. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Honorable Thaddeus Machrowicz, former Congressman from Michigan, and Matthew S. Szymczak, former Governor of the Federal Reserve, for their efforts on my behalf.

Especial thanks, of course, are due to the Secretary of State, and particularly to Mr. Robert Murphy, Deputy Under Secretary of State, who started the proceedings toward my release, as well as to the Department of State Officers at the American Embassy in Moscow and in Washington who through all the eight years since my case first became known gave of their time and energy to bring about my release.

I owe another special debt of thanks to my fellow Jesuits Fr. Daniel E. Power, S.J., and Fr. Edward W. McCawley, S.J. It was Fr. Power who first brought information about my case to the attention of the State Department and Fr. McCawley who gave so generously and unsparingly of himself and his time to keep my case alive and help bring it to a successful outcome.

To my sister Helen Gearhart, I am sincerely and deeply grateful for all her untiring efforts in Washington on my behalf. She and my other sister, Sister Mary Evangeline, O.S.F., were a constant source of encouragement to me by the deep sisterly concern so evident in their many letters and their unfailing confidence during the long years of waiting and sometimes disappointment.

Finally, I want to thank all my other brothers and sisters, my fellow Jesuits and the many other priests, the Bernardine Sisters and many other nuns, the many friends and relatives and all those whose names I do not even yet know, especially the schoolchildren, whose prayers and offerings made possible my eventual return.

May the good effects of all those prayers continue still to work together unto good for the many people to whom I devoted so many years in Russia.

Walter J. Ciszek, S.J.

Chapter One

THE BEGINNINGS

An Unlikely Priest

Ever since my return to America in October 1963—after twenty-three years inside the Soviet Union, fifteen of them spent in Soviet prisons or the prison camps of Siberia—I have been asked two questions above all: What was it like? and How did you manage to survive? Because so many have asked, I have finally agreed to write this book.

But I am not much of a storyteller. Moreover, there were thousands of others who shared my hardships and survived; I have always refused to think of my experiences as something special. Out of respect for those others, I will try to set down honestly and plainly, hiding nothing and highlighting nothing, the story of those years. I will try to tell, quite simply, what it was like.

Still, I am not sure that story in itself will answer clearly the harder of those two questions, How did you manage to survive? To me, the answer is simple and I can say quite simply: Divine Providence. But how can I explain it?

I don’t just mean that God took care of me. I mean that He called me to, prepared me for, then protected me during those years in Siberia. I am convinced of that; but then, it is my life, and I have experienced His hand at every turning. Yet I think for anyone really to understand how I managed to survive, it is necessary first of all to understand, in some small way at least, what sort of man I was and how I came to be in Russia in the first place.

I think, for instance, that you have to know I was born stubborn. Also, I was tough—not in the polite sense of the word, but in the sense our neighbors used the word those days in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, when they shook their heads and called me a tough. The fact is nothing to be proud of, but it shows as honestly as I know how to state it what sort of raw material God had to work with.

I was a bully, the leader of a gang, a street fighter—and most of the fights I picked on purpose, just for devilment. I had no use for school, except insofar as it had a playground where I could fight or wrestle or play sports—any sport. I refused to admit that there was anything along those lines I couldn’t do as well as—or better than—anyone else. Otherwise, as far as school was concerned, I spent so much time playing hooky that I had to repeat one whole year at St. Casi-mir’s parish school. Things were so bad, in fact, that while I was still in grammar school my father actually took me to the police station and insisted that they send me to reform school.

And yet my father, Martin, was the kindest of men. He was simply at his wit’s end: talking to me did no good; thrashings only gave me an opportunity to show how tough I was. And with his inherited pride and Old World belief in the family and the family name, I know that it was shame much more than anger that made him take such a step.

Both he and my mother, Mary, were of peasant stock. They had come to America from Poland in the 1890s and settled in Shenandoah, where my father went to work in the mines. The family album shows pictures of him as a handsome young miner, but I remember him as a medium-sized man with thick, black hair and a glorious mustache, stocky, and, if not fat, at least not the trim young miner of those tintypes. By the time I was born, on November 4, 1904, the seventh child of thirteen, he had opened a saloon. He wasn’t the world’s best shopkeeper, though; he had too soft a spot in his heart for other newly arrived immigrants.

I don’t think my father ever really understood me. We were both too stubborn ever to really get along. He wanted me to have the education he had never had a chance to have, and my attitude left him bewildered. On the other hand, although his humiliation and shame before the police that day—as they convinced him it would be more of a family disgrace to send me away to a reform school—made a deep impression on me, I would never have admitted it to him. I had inherited too much of his Polish streak of stubbornness.

Still, he was a wonderful father. I remember the day I went to a Boy Scout outing in another town and spent the money he had given me at an amusement park near the camping grounds. I had no money for the train fare home. Instead, I hitched a ride by hanging on to the outside of one of the cars. I was nearly killed against the wall of a tunnel we passed through, and I arrived back home in Shenandoah about 1 A.M., very cold, very tired, and very scared. My father, worried, was still waiting up for me. He lit a fire in the kitchen stove and then, without waking my mother, cooked a meal for me with his own hands and saw me safely into bed. Many years later, in the Siberian prison camps, it was that episode above all others that I remembered when I thought of my father.

If it was from my father that I inherited my toughness, it was from my mother that I received my religious training. She was a small, light-haired woman, very religious herself and strict with us children. She taught us our first prayers and trained us in the faith long before we entered the parish school. Two of my sisters entered the convent, but I could never be outwardly pious. Yet it must have been through my mother’s prayers and example that I made up my mind in the eighth grade, out of a clear blue sky, that I would be a priest.

My father refused to believe it. Priests, in his eyes, were holy men of God; I was anything but that. In the end, it was my mother who finally decided the issue, as mothers often do. She told me that if I wanted to be a priest, I had to be a good one. Since my father still had doubts, I was stubborn and insisted; that September I went off to Orchard Lake, Michigan, to SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary, where many other young Poles from our parish had gone before me.

But I had to be different. Even though I was in a seminary, I took great pains not to be thought pious. I was openly scornful, in fact, of those who were. At night, when there was no one around, I used to sneak down to the chapel to pray—but nothing or no one could have forced me to admit it.

And I had to be tough. I’d get up at 4:30 in the morning to run five miles around the lake on the seminary grounds or go swimming in November when the lake was little better than frozen. I still couldn’t stand to think that anyone could do something I couldn’t do, so one year during Lent I ate nothing but bread and water for the full forty days—another year I ate no meat at all for the whole year—just to see if I could do it.

Yet contrary to everything we were constantly told and advised, I never asked anyone’s permission to do all this, and I told no one. When our prefect finally noticed what I was doing and warned me I might hurt my health, I told him bluntly that I knew what I was doing. Of course I didn’t; I just had a fixed idea that I would always do the hardest thing.

Not just physically. One summer I stayed at school during summer vacation and worked in the fields, forcing myself to bear the loneliness and the separation from family and friends.

I loved baseball; I played it at school and then all summer long with the Shenandoah Indians, a home-town team that took on teams from other mining towns. I thought it would be very hard for me to give up playing the game—so, naturally, I gave it up. In my first year of college at Saints Cyril and Methodius, I just dropped off the team. We were supposed to play an important game in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and my decision caused something of a crisis. But I was as stubborn as ever. I refused to go.

It was while I was in the seminary that I first read a life of Saint Stanislaus Kostka. It impressed me tremendously. I wanted to smash most of the plaster statues that showed him with a sickly sweet look and eyes turned up to heaven; I could see plainly that Kostka was a tough young Pole who could— and did—walk from Warsaw to Rome through all sorts of weather and show no ill effects whatsoever. He was also a stubborn young Pole who stuck to his guns despite the arguments of his family and the persecution of his brother when he wanted to join the Society of Jesus. I liked that. I thought perhaps I ought to be a Jesuit. That same year, it was a Jesuit who gave us seminarians our annual retreat. I didn’t talk to him, but I thought even more of becoming a Jesuit.

And yet I didn’t want to be one. I was due to start theology in the fall; I’d be ordained in three years. If I joined the Jesuits, it would mean at least seven more years of study. I didn’t like the idea of joining a religious order, and I especially didn’t like what I’d read about the Jesuit hallmark of perfect obedience. I tried to argue myself out of it all that summer. Characteristically, I asked no one’s advice. I just prayed and fought with myself—and finally decided, since it was so hard, I would do it. God must have a special Providence for hardheaded people like me.

Then I had to do even that the hard way. I wrote a letter to the Polish Jesuits in Warsaw, telling them I wanted to enter the Society over there. Still, I hadn’t told anyone at the seminary or at home. After a wait that seemed like an eternity, I got an answer from Warsaw. I went to my room and opened it with trembling fingers. The letter was most gracious, but the gist of it was that I would probably find life and conditions in Poland much different from in America, and it suggested that if I wanted to be a Jesuit, I might contact the Jesuit Provincial in New York at Fordham Road.

Was I relieved? No, I was stubborn. I had decided I was going to be a Jesuit, so one morning I caught the train to New York without telling anyone. Somehow, I found my way to 501 Fordham Road, the office of the Jesuit Provincial. The brother in charge of the door told me the Provincial wasn’t in. I wouldn’t tell him what I wanted; I just asked when the Provincial would be back. He said the Provincial would return that evening, and I asked if I could see him. The brother shrugged his shoulders, and I left.

I hadn’t eaten anything, so I found a cafeteria, then spent the afternoon walking up and down Fordham Road, suffering from a delayed case of butterflies in my stomach. At six o’clock the Provincial still wasn’t home; I went out and walked around the grounds of the Fordham University campus, feeling more nervous all the time.

At 7:30 I returned to the Provincial’s residence and asked if he had returned. The brother told me to take a seat in the parlor. About eight o’clock, Fr. Kelly, the Provincial, came into the parlor and asked me what it was all about. I told him who I was and that I wanted to be a Jesuit. He looked at me for a moment, then sat down. He wanted to know about my parents. I told him I was twenty-four years of age and the decision was mine to make. Then I reminded him of Saint Stanislaus’ walk from Warsaw to Rome to see the Jesuit Provincial there. Fr. Kelly just stared at me, so I rushed on, trying to explain why I wanted to be a Jesuit.

I really wasn’t much help, I guess, because I simply kept insisting doggedly that I wanted to join the Society. About the only concrete facts he could get out of me were my marks at the seminary. After a while, he told me to wait, then left the room and sent another priest in to talk it over with me further. He was a wonderful old man whose name I’ve forgotten. He was quite deaf. He had some sort of hearing device, and with the aid of much shouting we managed to get through the story again. I remember I kept shouting that I was determined to be a Jesuit.

I also talked to another priest that night, and finally, about eleven o’clock, Fr. Kelly returned to tell me things would probably work out all right, but that I should go home and wait for his answer. It never occurred to me that when I heard from him the answer might be no. I went home and began to pack, happy as I had ever been. It was more than joy—it was a deep and soul-satisfying peace. It was something more, too, than just the quiet and release from tension that follows the settling of any emotional problem—it was a positive and deep-seated happiness akin to the feeling of belonging or of having reached safe harbor, but deeper than that and a gift of God.

When Fr. Kelly’s letter did come, it was a notice to report on September 7, 1928, to the Jesuit novitiate at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, Poughkeepsie, New York. Still, I waited to tell my father until the very morning I had to leave. He looked at Fr. Kelly’s letter for a long time, as if he had trouble comprehending it, then said quite suddenly: Nothing doing! You’re going back to the seminary. No, sir, I said, I’m going to St. Andrew’s.

We argued then like father and son, each as stubborn as the other, until at last my father banged his fist on the table and said, For the last time, you’re not going! With that, I banged my fist on the table and shouted, I am going! I’m the one who’s going, not you, and I am going to St. Andrews, even if I have to choose between God and you! On that note, I took my bags and walked out of the house without a farewell or the traditional father’s blessing.

Yet, after all my struggle to reach St. Andrew-on-Hudson, I was anything but an ideal novice. I disliked displays of piety, and I looked with disdain on those novices, most of them younger than I, who in their zeal and fervor for this new religious life moderated their external actions to conform with every little rule and regulation. I preferred to keep the corners a little rough. So it wasn’t long before Fr. Weber, the master of novices, called me into his office one day and told me he thought I ought to leave the Society.

I was stunned. Then my Polish stubborn streak sparked up, and I almost shouted, I will not! Fr. Weber was startled in turn. He stood up abruptly and came around his desk toward me; I edged around the desk in the other direction. What’s going on here? he said, almost incredulously. Who do you think you’re talking to?

I just won’t leave, that’s all, I said—and with that my stubbornness dissolved into tears. I had fought so hard to be here; I had done so much to get here; I had known such peace at last; and now it was all caving in around my ears.

Fr. Weber sat me down in a chair and waited for a certain amount of calm to descend upon us both. After that, we had a good long talk. Fr. Weber pulled no punches, but I could see that he respected me and liked me and, despite my failings, trusted me. He talked about my good qualities and talents and the necessity for channeling them properly if they were ever really to be put at God’s disposal.

Early in 1929, at one of his daily talks to the novices, Fr. Weber brought in an important letter that had just come from Rome. It was from Pope Pius XI, To all Seminarians, especially our Jesuit sons, calling for men to enter a new Russian center being started at Rome to prepare young clerics for possible future work in Russia.

The Pope went on to explain how the Soviets since 1917 had continually increased their persecution of religion; how all the Catholic bishops had been arrested in Russia and sent to concentration camps; how all the seminaries—Catholic and Orthodox—had been closed or confiscated; how hundreds of parishes were without pastors; how it was forbidden to teach religion to children. Above all, the Holy Father emphasized what a great need of well-trained and especially courageous priests there would be in that immense country. Even as Fr. Weber read the letter something within me stirred. I knew I had come to the end of a long search. I was convinced that God had at last sought me out and was telling me the answer to my long desire and the reason for all my struggles.

This conviction was so strong that I could hardly wait for the conference to finish. I became impatient and began to get restless. As soon as the conference ended, I went straight to the Master’s room. He was startled to see me all flushed and excited, and he asked if anything was wrong.

Nothing, Father, I said quickly, but there is something I have to talk over with you. He told me to sit down, then listened to me attentively. You know, Father, I blurted out, when you read the Holy Father’s letter in there just now it was almost like a direct call from God. I felt I had to volunteer for the Russian mission. I knew it from the beginning, and as you kept on reading that feeling grew until at the end I was fully convinced that Russia was my destination. I know, I firmly believe, that God wants me there and I will be there in the future.

Fr. Weber looked at me for a long time and then said slowly, Well, Walter, you must pray over this. After all, you have just begun the novitiate. Things like this require time and God’s grace. I wouldn’t want to discourage you, so keep this in mind and pray over it. After you’ve taken your vows, perhaps we’ll be able to see more clearly if this is God’s will for you or not.

Then he sent me off, without a definite answer. Of course, I see now that my hurried declaration could easily have been the enthusiasm of a moment or an overeager and superficial desire for something new and extraordinary. But as I walked down the corridor from his office, I felt completely sure of myself. No doubt ever entered my mind, either then or at any time thereafter.

I could hardly wait for vow day, which was still almost a year and a half away, on September 8, 1930. Before that time, I was sent with the first class of novices to the new Jesuit novitiate of the Maryland-New York Province in Wernersville, Pennsylvania; we were the first group of novices ever to pronounce the vows of the Society in that house. It was a great day for all of us, but for me it meant the period of waiting to volunteer for Russia was over.

Immediately, I wrote to Very Reverend Father General, volunteering explicitly for the Russian mission. The time it took for the letter to reach Rome and for the reply to come back across the Atlantic seemed like forever. But when it finally came, the letter was simple and explicit, and my joy knew no bounds. The General said he was happy to receive my most generous offer to serve on the Russian mission, that he was even happier to be able to accept my offer and to inform me that from then on I would be considered as one designated for the Russian mission. For the time being, though, I was to continue the usual course of studies in the Society and to pray continually for the fulfillment of this dream; when the time came I would be summoned to Rome.

For two years, therefore, I remained at Wernersville for the period of studies in the humanities known in the Society as the Juniorate. After that, I went to Woodstock College in Woodstock, Maryland, to begin the course in philosophy. Before I left the Juniorate, though, I wrote again to Father General—just so he wouldn’t forget me and hoping that he just might call me to Rome to study philosophy there.

The General’s answer was brief but cordial. He assured me I hadn’t been forgotten and mentioned that conditions in Russia were hard and that working there would not be easy. He therefore exhorted me again to pray constantly and prepare myself for a difficult period of study at the Russicum and the even more difficult work in Russia.

I needed no encouragement. I still kept up, almost religiously, my practice of forty-five minutes of calisthenics every day, a practice I had started as a young tough. Although by this time I was finally learning to ask advice and guidance—and to do what I was told—I also continued my practice of going without certain things and of undertaking annoying jobs, just to condition myself to do the harder thing and to strengthen my will. And with this in mind, I wrote my thesis required for the degree in philosophy On the Training of the Will.

Toward the end of my second year at Woodstock, I received the overwhelming news that I was to go to Rome that fall to begin the study of theology and to start my work at the Russian college. I sailed for Rome that summer of 1934, a very happy young man.

Like all the Jesuit students of theology in Rome, I lived at the old Collegio Santo Roberto Bellarmino on the Via del Seminario and studied theology at the Gregorian University just off the Piazza Pilotta. At the same time, I was studying the Russian language, liturgy, and history in the Collegio Russico, or Russicum, on the Via Carlo Cattaneo, not far from the basilica of St. Mary Major.

The years of theological study, for those of us at the Russicum, were pretty hectic. But, as a sort of sideline, I also studied French and German during those years and acquired enough mastery of the languages so that, when I was ordained three years later, I was able to hear confessions in the French and German parishes around Rome.

The greatest hardship for me, in fact, during those years of study was the Oriental liturgy. Those of us assigned to the Russicum had Mass every morning in the Oriental rite, and I couldn’t stand it. But since I had made up my mind to work in Russia, I hung on grimly, trying to learn and appreciate it.

The man who did the most to help me come to love it was a big bear of a fellow named Nestrov. He was a native Russian with a fine bass voice, rich and deep, who loved and served the liturgy as only Russians can. We became close friends, not because of the liturgy, but because of our shared enthusiasm over the dream of going into Russia. Everyone in the newly founded Russian College, indeed, shared this dream of going into Russia to help the faithful who were now, in our Lord’s metaphor, like sheep without a shepherd.

It was a very mixed and international group. There was a Belgian, Fr. Paul Mailleux, who became head of Fordham University’s John XXIII Center for Ecumenical Studies, formerly called the Russian Center. There were three Englishmen, three Spaniards, two Italians, Nestrov the Russian, a Pole, and a Rumanian. I was the only American at that time, although there had been several before, and there were many who came after me.

Yet of them all, there was no one who could match my conviction or Nestrov’s enthusiasm for going into Russia. The others, in fact, used to kid us about it; we were on fire with the idea. We studied everything we could about Russia—the customs of the people, their habits, the Russian character and culture, the nature of the land itself, and its history. We talked of it all the time—to the real or feigned dismay of our fellow theologians—hoping, scheming, planning, and dreaming about Russia.

Another almost constant companion was Fr. Makar, the Pole. But my mother was a Georgian, Makar always added, and he was a mischief-maker by profession. A great schemer and practical joker, he could keep the whole crowd laughing for hours, and big, easy-going Nestrov was often the butt of his jokes. Yet the three of us got on so well together that we were nicknamed The Three Musketeers.

After three happy but hectic years, I was ordained in Rome on June 24, 1937. Like almost all the men at the Russicum, I was ordained to say Mass in the Oriental rite, although we also had the privilege of saying Mass in the Latin rite whenever it was necessary. And so I said my first Mass as a priest in the Oriental rite, in the basilica of St. Paul, at the altar over his tomb.

My father and mother had died during my years of study, so they never had the consolation, after all they had suffered through with me, of attending the first Mass of their priestson. None of my brothers or sisters was able to come to Rome either, but they wrote me letters of congratulation and joy at my ordination. In their stead, I was joined on the occasion of my first Mass by Fr. Vincent A. McCormick, S.J., the American Assistant in Rome to Father General, and by Mrs. Nicholas Brady, the foundress of Wernersville. The three of us had breakfast after Mass, and, flushed with the joy of ordination, I chatted happily for hours of my dreams of going to Russia and my conviction that I would be there soon.

Frs. Nestrov and Makar were members of the Polish Province of the Society of Jesus, with headquarters in Warsaw. During their final year of theology after ordination, they were told that it was impossible for anyone to enter Russia at that time, so they would return to Poland to work among the Oriental-rite Catholics there. Nestrov was especially downcast at the news. Yet I was still convinced that I would go to Russia, and I had great hopes, somehow, of being sent there immediately.

Then one day I received word that Father General wanted to see me. I was startled; I knew that Father General Ledochowski had always taken a personal interest in the Russian mission ever since he had been asked by Pope Pius XI to assign young Jesuit volunteers to the work, but this was the first time I had a chance to talk to him personally.

Fr. Ledochowski, as I remember him that day, was a small, frail man with a thin, ascetic face, sunken cheeks, high forehead, and the most serene eyes I have ever seen. He was a man who radiated peace and quiet, impressive in his simplicity and dignity. He had a decisive, almost abrupt, way of speaking, yet he was most charming and easy to talk to. He welcomed me warmly and listened attentively while I spoke of my hopes and my ideals and my dream of working in Russia.

We talked together for over twenty minutes. He told me how much he appreciated my hopes and shared my dream, but for the time being it was impossible to send men into Russia. As he spoke, he got up from his chair and paced the room somewhat restlessly. Conditions as we know them, he said, would make it imprudent to try to send men into Russia now. I know you must be disappointed, but the mission in Albertin, Poland, needs men right now, and the work there is very fruitful. The mission is flourishing and is a great source of vocations for the Oriental rite and the Russian College. I would like you to work there, if you would, for the time being. But I want you to keep your dream of going into Russia, and perhaps someday God may grant us both our wishes.

He could read the disappointment on my face, I guess, and he was very kind. At least, he asked me to keep him informed of my work on the mission at Albertin, spoke fondly once