With God in Russia: The Inspiring Classic Account of a Catholic Priest's Twenty-three Years in Soviet Prisons and Labor Camps - Softcover

Walter J. Ciszek; Daniel Flaherty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006264162X ISBN 13: 9780062641625

Publisher: HarperOne, 2017

Synopsis

Republished for a new century and featuring an afterword by Father James Martin, SJ, the classic memoir of an American-born Jesuit priest imprisoned for fifteen years in a Soviet gulag during the height of the Cold War―a poignant and spiritually uplifting story of extraordinary faith and fortitude as indelible as Unbroken. Foreword by Daniel L. Flaherty.

While ministering in Eastern Europe during World War II, Polish-American priest Walter Ciszek, S.J., was arrested by the NKVD, the Russian secret police, shortly after the war ended. Accused of being an American spy and charged with agitation with intent to subvert, he was held in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison for five years. The Catholic priest was then sentenced without trial to ten more years of hard labor and transported to Siberia, where he would become a prisoner within the forced labor camp system made famous in Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize―winning book The Gulag Archipelago.

In With God in Russia, Ciszek reflects on his daily life as a prisoner, the labor he endured while working in the mines and on construction gangs, his unwavering faith in God, and his firm devotion to his vows and vocation. Enduring brutal conditions, Ciszek risked his life to offer spiritual guidance to fellow prisoners who could easily have exposed him for their own gains. He chronicles these experiences with grace, humility, and candor, from his secret work leading mass and hearing confessions within the prison grounds, to his participation in a major gulag uprising, to his own resurrection―his eventual release in a prisoner exchange in October 1963 which astonished all who had feared he was dead.

Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him.

About this title

About the Author

Walter Ciszek, S.J. a native of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, was an American Jesuit priest who spent twenty-three years in the Soviet Union before and during the Cold War as a missionary. In an era when many Catholic Russians were persecuted, he was sent to the region from Rome. He was the author of With God in Russia and the bestseller He Leadeth Me.

From the Back Cover

“A story about the relationship between God and a person who wanted to give himself totally to God’s service.”

—from the afterword by James Martin, SJ, author of the New York Times bestseller The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

The classic memoir by American-born Jesuit priest Walter Ciszek, who survived fifteen years of imprisonment in the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 006264162X
• ISBN 13: 9780062641625
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352