With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  Since, as I have said, Father Bienko was a man of large spiritual vision and practical bent, he agreed to let us go. He told us, however, that we must first have the permission of Metropolitan Shepticki, Archbishop of Lvov for the Oriental rite.

  Nestrov made the arrangements and I met him a day or so later at the Archbishop’s palace in the Platz Yuria near St. George’s cathedral. The Archbishop then was an old man, but so revered by his people that the Communists could not attack him openly. He was so crippled he had to be carried in on a chair to meet us, but his eyes were bright and his mind as clear as a bell. He welcomed us warmly and heard us out before he said anything at all.

  This shrewd and kindly patriarch knew Russia from personal experience. He began by telling us how much he appreciated our enthusiasm, but he also warned us of the difficulties we would face. Finally, when he saw how keen we were to go, he said: “I’ll tell you what, suppose we try it for a year. I’ll give you permission to try to enter Russia, but you must be very careful and take no chances. Your object must be simply to study the situation and see whether it is really possible to do much priestly work in Russia. Lord knows, the people need you.”

  Then he began to tell us in detail things we had heard from others in bits and snatches. He described how the Russians had been rounding up everyone who had served in the government or the police, teachers, lawyers, professional men, members of the nobility—or even those who were a little richer than the average—and had been sending them, according to reports, to work in the Urals. Certainly, he said, those people would accept us as priests if we could reach them. We could also explore further the possibilities of working among the Russians themselves.

  “But remember,” he said, “this is only an experiment, an exploratory expedition. I want you to return to me after a year or so and let me know your experiences.” With that he gave us his blessing and told us to return for more detailed instructions when we had completed arrangements for the trip. Nestrov and I were so elated that we hardly heard the kindly old Metropolitan’s warnings about the difficulties before us. “What did I tell you?” I said as we walked down the corridors of the Archbishop’s palace. “Russia in the spring!”

  Immediately we set to work on arrangements for the journey into Russia. We turned instinctively to our scheming Georgian, Father Makar, who could arrange things if anyone could. Makar seemed to know everybody, to have contacts everywhere. Our first problem was to get some Polish identification papers. We wanted to be hired to work in the Urals, not be deported there. Obviously, we wouldn’t be permitted to enter Russia as priests. Moreover, there was little chance the Russians would let me into the country on my American passport, and, though Nestrov was a Russian, the Communists would want to know why and how he had come to leave the country, what he was doing in Poland, and why he wanted to go back.

  Identification papers, however, presented no problem to Makar. They would have to be false, but they didn’t have to be forged. He knew just where to reach former government officials; from them he got two sets of official Polish identification papers and brought them home to us. Then Nestrov and I set about creating biographies for ourselves which would explain why we were two men traveling alone, without families, to work for the Russians in the Urals. I became “Wladimir Lypinski,” a Pole and a widower whose family had been killed in a German air raid. Nestrov became “Kuralski.” When we were satisfied with our stories, Makar took the completed papers back to the former officials. They were stamped, sealed, and initialed according to form; our new identification was complete.

  With those papers we presented ourselves at the office of Lespromhoz, a big lumber combine that was hiring men for work in the Ural regions. They were anxious to get workers, so few questions were asked; we were hired on the spot and given our working certificates. They asked us to report back in a week for further instructions, at which time also we would get train tickets and a 150-ruble ($15) advance on our salary to pay for food and expenses on the trip.

  A week didn’t leave us much time to get ready, but we were eager to go. We talked the situation over again for the last time with Father Bienko. We agreed to leave my American passport and Nestrov’s Russian passport with the Jesuits at Lvov so we would have them on our return from Russia. Finally, Fr. Bienko appointed me the acting Jesuit Superior on the trip, so that if any decisions were to be made about the time of our return or what sort of work we would do, that responsibility would be mine.

  Last of all, we returned to see the Archbishop. We informed him of our plans and preparation, showed him our identification cards and working permits. He was not happy with the names we had chosen. They sounded too Polish, he said; he thought we should have taken White Russian or Ukrainian names. “However,” he said, “it’s too late to change them now, so we will hope nothing comes of it.” Then he went over with us again, very carefully, the limitations we were to set ourselves and the type of work we were to try to do.

  As a final safeguard, the Archbishop tore a page from a book, tore it in half again, then gave us half the page and kept the other half himself. If we sent anyone to him with a message, he told us, or especially if we sent any candidates for the seminary to him from the Urals, we were to send along a piece of that page so it could be matched against the half sheet kept by the Archbishop to prove that the man or message had indeed come from us.

  At the end of our long discussion, we knelt to receive the Archbishop’s blessing. He looked at us for a long moment before he blessed us—but said nothing. Then, as a sort of anticlimax, a nun came in with a great wagon-wheel-sized loaf of white bread the Sisters had baked for our journey. They also promised us their prayers.

  When we returned to the lumber company next day for our instructions, we were told to report to the Lvov station on the morning of March 15 and were simply handed a boxcar number in place of train tickets. Moreover, the money we had been expecting turned out to be not 150 rubles apiece, but 150 rubles for both of us. That had to last us until we reached our assignment in Chusovoy, a trip which might take anywhere from two weeks to a month.

  The 15th of March, a week before the beginning of spring 1940—it seemed like a good omen. The last evening we went to confession to prepare ourselves for we knew not what, and received Father Bienko’s blessing. The next morning we said Mass for the last time in a chapel, packed our Mass kit and suitcases, tucked the huge loaf of white bread and a pound of fatback under our arms, and set off for the railroad station and Russia, with the indomitable Makar to see us off.

  ALIAS “WLADIMIR LYPINSKI”

  BOXCAR 89725 HAD two rows of rough plank bunks along the walls (“upper and lower berths,” Makar called them), straw on the floor, and a ventilator at the top of the car. The only other furnishings were an old punctured oil drum which served as a stove, and a slop bucket to serve as a toilet. There were no windows. The cracks in the side walls were big enough to see through, however, and equally drafty.

  At the start of the trip, there were twenty-five of us in the car. The great majority of our fellow travelers were Jews who had fled before the Nazi advance into Poland. Franck was the first to introduce himself, a Warsaw Communist who had left the city just before it fell to the Germans. Homeless now, he had decided to take his family, his wife, his ten-year-old son, and his nephew, to live in that paradise he had read so much about in Communist literature.

  Franck was not the only man with children on this trip. Whole families were on the train—grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, and children. Uprooted after generations, they were carrying everything they owned on their backs, like refugees everywhere, to a new life in an alien land. Yet there was a great spirit of friendliness among the group; everyone seemed to be trying to be as helpful and cheerful as possible under the circumstances.

  The trip from Lvov to the Urals was long and rough. We went first to Vinnitsa and Kiev, then up through Bryansk and Kaluga to Gorki, east again to Kazan and Ufa, and finally north along the Urals and
the Chusovaya River to the town of Chusovoy itself, about 50 miles from Perm, which was then called “Molotov.” We moved in a series of fits and starts; every train on the tracks seemed to have priority over our work train. Sometimes we’d sit on a siding for two days before moving on again.

  In a way, the frequent stops were a blessing. They gave us a chance to walk around a bit, to clean out the slop bucket used as a toilet. We also took turns fetching water for our constant thirst or trying to buy food. But there was little food to be had. The eating places in the towns along our route couldn’t sell us anything. “What food we have,” they would say, “is just enough for the workers in town here. We can’t take care of refugees.” It was something of a shock for Franck to discover that in his workers’ paradise there might not be enough food, but he attributed it to the war.

  Once a day we could each buy a small loaf of bread from the storecar on the train, sometimes a pound or so of little caramels. If we were really lucky, we might even buy an onion or a cabbage from a passing farmer. But for the most part our food consisted almost entirely of the little we had brought with us. Nestrov and I shared the pound of fatback we had brought along. We ate it raw, along with mouthfuls of the bread we bought and gulps of water.

  Our one other great need in the raw damp air of March was fuel to heat the car. We all soon became adept at stealing from the coal piles at stations where we stopped or gleaning lumps of coal along the tracks. Sometimes we even snatched it from the engine while the train was standing on a siding.

  People in the towns along the way were suspicious of refugees. One day, on a siding somewhere between Vinnitsa and Kiev, it was my turn to get the water. The closest place seemed to be a nearby collective farm. Franck’s young son, Aaron, had become quite attached to me and trotted along beside me to the farm. No sooner had we reached the pump than a woman stepped out of one of the houses and began to yell at us like a shrew. She called us “Poles,” “vagrants,” and “dirty refugees,” and said we had no business at the farm pump. Before she would let us “pollute” the water, she said, she would call out the dogs, so we had better get away from there in a hurry.

  It had been a long ride that day; we were thirsty and bone-tired. Her screeching was the last straw. I began to reply in kind. Words I hadn’t used since I was a boy on the streets of Shenandoah somehow came pouring out. The lady with the fishwife’s tongue was dumbfounded for a moment, then retreated safely indoors. Little Aaron said nothing, but he must have reported the whole story to his father because Franck sidled up to me in the boxcar afterwards and said joshingly, “Well, I never would have thought you could get so mad. You really must have told that old lady off!” I was glad at that moment no one in the car knew Nestrov and I were priests.

  I think it was that very night—although one day of that journey tends to blur in my memory into the next—that we crossed the old pre-war border between Poland and Russia. I do remember that it was the feast of St. Joseph, March 19th. And I do remember, too, nudging Nestrov in the ribs and saying softly, as I had said at the Archbishop’s palace in Lvov, “There you are—Russia in the spring!”

  We looked at each other for a moment in silence. There was no way of knowing what the future would bring, but we were doing at last what we had dreamt so many years of doing. It didn’t matter if no one else in that boxcar knew we were priests. We knew it. Crossing the border gave me a strange sense of exhilaration and, yet, of loneliness, of a beginning and an end to the life we had known. I couldn’t help wondering whether, like so many priests before us, we would be asked to give our lives for the Faith. I remember falling asleep that night repeating to the clicking rhythm of the train wheels, “I am ready. I am ready. I am ready.”

  The jolting, stop-and-go trip from Lvov to Chusovoy, well over 1,500 miles on our roundabout route, took better than two weeks. The scenery, unless we stopped at a siding or peeked out through the cracks, was the same four walls of the boxcar and a shifting shaft of sunlight from the ventilator in the roof. That was our world, and within it we existed as best we could. Conversation, as the hours lengthened day by day into weeks, became pretty much the same. The families talked among themselves of home and their new hopes. Together we talked about the opportunities that lay ahead in the Urals.

  From time to time, at one of the sidings, more people would pile into the cars, other hopefuls on their way, for their own reasons, to work in the Urals. They met with a mixed reception. They took up precious space in the boxcars which had already begun to seem too small; they were other mouths to feed, and the food was almost gone. Even the storecar could no longer provide bread every day. But they also brought new topics of conversation and new stories, perhaps a snatch or two of news, to break up the monotony.

  After two grinding weeks of tedium, we finally braked to a halt on a siding outside Chusovoy, the end of our pilgrimage. The town itself is strung out along the right bank of the Chusovaya River where it joins the Usva River in the foothills of the Urals, about 750 miles northeast of Moscow. A great lumber center, where logs floated down the rivers were loaded on the railroad to Perm, Chusovoy now was a boom town, producing charcoal and pig iron for Russia’s war effort in the Ural regions. There were great kilns all along the river bank to make charcoal for smelting ore, and the Russians were working hard to develop the rich iron-ore deposits discovered in the area.

  We had arrived, but we were not to stay. At the railroad yards we were told we would be working, not in Chusovoy, but in the lumber yards of Teplaya-Gora, another boom town some 50 miles farther east. Then we were turned over to our conveyor—or supervisor—a tall, gaunt, shifty-eyed judge. He had us pile out of the boxcars, show our papers, and submit to a head count, lest any of the “volunteers” might have deserted on the way.

  The judge seemed immediately suspicious of Nestrov and me, two men traveling together without families. I had to tell him the tragic story of how I lost my wife and children in one split-second during a German air raid. We had been crossing the street, I said, when the bomb exploded next to us. My wife and son and two daughters were killed outright; I was blown across the street. When I could crawl back to the crater, I found my wife lying across the body of our youngest daughter, both dead, and of the other children there was no sign. I felt my whole life had ended, so I decided to seek a new life in the lumber yards of the Urals where the pay was rumored to be good and few questions would be asked.

  The judge showed not a bit of sympathy. Aside from a few muttered remarks, however, and a couple of sidelong glances at us from time to time, he said nothing further. I decided, though, that I had better polish up my delivery to make the story more moving for the next inquisitor. After he made sure we were all accounted for, the judge proceeded to give us our instructions. He sounded as if we were prisoners before the bench.

  Under no circumstances, he told us, were we to leave the cars without his permission until we arrived in Teplaya-Gora. Representatives from each car would be allowed to go into Chusovoy to purchase food: he supposed we might be hungry after our journey from Lvov. (That sarcastic comment was the closest we ever heard him come to a humane word.) We would be quartered, he continued, in barracks at Teplaya-Gora. We would be paid a minimum wage. Whether or not we earned enough to keep clothes on our backs and food on the table depended on how hard we worked and what bonuses we earned. We had volunteered to work and work we would; the Urals were not a summer camp. Then he added, almost as an afterthought, that deserters would be severely punished. Another crime that would not be tolerated was drunkenness. Parents would see to it that their children stayed out of trouble.

  All in all, it was quite a reception to be given a volunteer labor brigade. Franck, with his dreams of a workers’ paradise, was stunned. But at least there was food to be had—and we were famished. When the judge dismissed us, we climbed back into the cars, pooled our meager resources, and enjoyed our best meal in two weeks. It was a mistake, but we had no way of knowing we would sit on that siding for ne
arly three days before moving to Teplaya-Gora. During that time, we had little money left to buy food. In order to eat, some of the families even pawned the possessions they had guarded so preciously all the way from Lvov.

  Three days later, nearly starving, we reached Teplaya-Gora in a pouring rain. The judge turned us over to another Party member and some Lespromhoz representatives, so we had to stand in the rain for another head count to make sure that everyone who had been at Chusovoy had reached Teplaya-Gora. When at last the formalities were over, we were told to load our belongings onto horse-drawn wagons for the trip to the lumber camp, well out into the slopes beyond the town.

  We worked in the pouring rain, Nestrov and I helping the Francks and other families load their possessions into the wagons. The dirt roads were rivers of mud, and the horses had a tough time negotiating the mile or so to the camp. We were continually jumping out of the wagon to shove it over a bump in the road or out of a deep rut, standing ankle-deep in mud, splattered by the clods thrown from the horses’ shoes.

  At the lumber camp, the barracks were new and raw. Large sections in the walls, where the timbers had warped, were stuffed with mud and a plaster like stucco. The partitions between rooms were roughly done; through the ill-fitted boards you could see every move of people in the room next door. There was little enough privacy that way, but most of the families at least had a room to themselves. Nestrov and I, since we had no families, were assigned to a dormitory.

  There were clean sheets on the beds—straw mattresses stretched over boards—and the floors were scrubbed. There were clean, rough-hewn tables and a stove in each section of the barrack for heating. Cooking was done on another stove at the end of the corridor which ran between the rooms, and everyone took turns at it during mealtimes. Most of the men in our barrack were oldtimers who had been sent here during the collectivizations of the 1930s. They greeted us warmly, if somewhat boisterously, assigned us beds, and gave us a rundown on the routine. For a day or two, though, we newcomers did no work. We spent our time getting acquainted with the camp and being interviewed for jobs.