With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  Several nights later, at 3 A.M., the secret police surrounded the barracks. Nestrov and I, along with our roommates—Fuchs, Valery, and Janocz—were arrested as German spies. How many others in the camp were arrested that night I don’t know, but there were a good many.

  The young NKVD agent in charge held us at gunpoint while his men searched the room. They found two bottles of Mass wine in the room, a half-pound bag of tooth powder I had bought, a roll of cotton, and some papers on which the caretaker’s little boy had been practicing the alphabet. These items were immediately identified as “bottles of nitroglycerin” (the wine was white), “gun powder and packing for making bombs,” and the secret ciphers of a “code.” It still sounds ridiculous, but it wasn’t funny that morning at 3 A.M., with the barrack in an uproar and the NKVD holding us at gunpoint. We were allowed to pack a few things, then were marched off to jail in Chusovoy.

  IN THE HANDS OF THE NKVD

  I WAS FIRST held in the juvenile home at Chusovoy, an old, eight-room house which now served as a place of detention. There had been so many other arrests in the camp that night that the jails were crowded. My belongings were examined by the guard in charge, the contents carefully entered in a ledger. Then I was photographed—front and profile—and taken to a cell. Actually, the cell was simply one room of the old house, perhaps 10 feet square, in which about twenty-five or thirty young men were already crammed, ranging in age from youngsters of about ten to adolescents of about seventeen.

  It was stifling hot in the little room, and most of the boys wore nothing but a pair of shorts. I felt rather foolish being thrown in among them, but I had to make the best of it. “Zdravstvuite! (Howdy!)” I said, with a cautious smile in the face of their suspicious glances. Then I offered the older fellows in the room two packs of makhorka (smoking tobacco) I had in my pocket. They accepted with alacrity.

  “What are you in for, Pops?” growled a short, stubby seventeen-year-old with smoldering eyes. “They say I’m a German spy,” I said, and proceeded to tell them the story of the arrest. By the time they had finished laughing at the story of the “nitroglycerin” and the thought of making “bombs” with tooth powder and cotton, we had become friends. The little fellow with the black hair and smoldering eyes who had called me “Pops” seemed to be the leader of the group. His name was Vanya, and he seemed especially amused at the story of my arrest. He informed the crowd that anyone who bothered me would have to deal with him.

  Actually, they were all friendly; they even put on a little show in my honor. Each of them told a story or a joke, most of them dirty, and they sang a number of bawdy songs. I took it as a sign on their part they had accepted me. At dinnertime, they gave me the first bowl of kasha before dividing the rest among themselves, and that night they gave me the best place to sleep.

  Early the next morning, I was called out and sent by train, under heavy guard, to the oblast (district) prison at Perm. There I was photographed again, had my hair clipped close, was deloused, and finally led into a large cell, perhaps 30 by 30 feet. It held five people when I entered in the morning; by nightfall, it was crowded with more than a hundred.

  Because of the German invasion, the Russians seemed to be arresting anyone of whom they had the slightest suspicion. As far as we could make out by comparing stories, they seemed to be working from lists drawn up long in advance. There were teachers, ordinary workers, minor officials in the government, lawyers, a few soldiers—just about anyone, it seemed, who might be considered a bad security risk or had fallen knowingly or unknowingly into enough disfavor to get his name into the NKVD dossiers. Martin, for instance, was a middle-aged man who held a very responsible position in one of the automobile plants in Perm. He had been a Trotsky sympathizer during the 1930s, however, and he was paying for it now.

  As the day wore on and the crowd increased, the cell became a bedlam. The prisoners were understandably tense and edgy; fights started just because someone inadvertently stuck his elbow in his neighbor’s rib. Late in the afternoon, a young redhead who proclaimed himself a Tartar was shoved into the cell carrying two loaves of bread. When he refused to share it, several people grabbed at the bread; he began to raise a row. To quiet him, someone threw a blanket over his head and his neighbors beat him unmercifully until he stopped yelling. He got no sympathy from anyone. Those standing by told him he got what he deserved: in prison you have to share.

  We got no food that first day because the arrests were coming so thick and fast no arrangements had been made to feed the prisoners. Afterward, we were fed three times a day. In the morning they gave us bread, 600 grams (about 1 ½ pounds) apiece, some boiling water, and two small blocks of sugar. At noon we got a half liter of soup; in the evening, two or three spoonfuls of kasha. At any rate that was the ration—but it wasn’t always possible to get your share. The guards simply shoved the food into the room in buckets and it was up to the prisoners to distribute it themselves.

  I stayed in that cell almost two months. It was always crowded, but there was a constant turnover of prisoners. What happened to the ones who left we never knew, but the continual talk and terror of the prisoners was mass executions. Martin, the Trotskyite, shouldered his way to me through the crowd after he had been interrogated one afternoon and gave me a piece of bread he had hidden since breakfast. “This is for you,” he said. “If you ever get out of here, try to find my wife. I know I’m going to be shot.” That night he was called out. He never returned.

  Of course, there was no such thing as privacy, even to perform the natural processes. Each evening we were led in groups to the prison toilet, but at all other times we had to use a covered barrel in the cell. The odor in the room was foul. Every afternoon, too, we were taken out in groups to walk in the courtyard for perhaps twenty minutes of exercise. Otherwise, we were confined like sardines, with not even enough room to stretch out and sleep. The only measure of privacy was to withdraw within yourself, as many did, or else to engage in conversation with one or two people nearest you and try to ignore what was happening in the rest of the room.

  Every so often, the guard would call out a name and someone would be led away. Sometimes he never came back; more often, he had only been summoned for questioning. Some would return crying, others angry, others dejected, some beaten black and blue. Those who had been in prison during earlier purges were quite willing to give advice on how to behave and what to say when you were interrogated. I soon found out, though, that the advice was of little help when you entered the interrogation room. You might well come away without having told them anything, but you never came back smug.

  It was at Perm that I was first interrogated seriously and at any length. On the second day, I was called out by the guard and led down the corridor to a small office. Neither imposing nor terrifying, it was simply furnished with a desk for the interrogator, a chair or two, and an iron filing cabinet. The interrogator was a tall, black-haired, fine-featured man who might have been taken anywhere for a scholar. He was quiet and composed, precise in his speech, and had obviously done his homework. Yet he could swear with a venom to which I could never get accustomed; it made me flinch, no matter how often I heard it.

  He invited me to sit down, then paused to read some papers. At last he looked up and asked softly, “Who are you?” I began to recite the story of Lypinski. He waved his hand as if he were wiping all pretense aside. “No, no, no,” he said, “you are not Lypinski, you are not a Russian, and you are not a Pole. You are a priest and your name is Ciszek and you are a spy for the Germans. Now why don’t you tell us all about it?” I was stunned. I wondered how long they had known all this, how long I had been under surveillance. They might have learned I was a priest from one of the Poles in the hospital at Chusovoy, but how had they learned my name? Was it possible that they had found some way to force Nestrov to talk? If so, how much did they know?

  Having achieved precisely the effect he wanted, the interrogator smiled. “You see, we know all about you. So suppose you
try telling me the truth.” “Very well,” I said, “the truth is I am not a German spy.” Instead of answering, he stood up and walked to the filing cabinet. From the top drawer he took out the two bottles of wine, the bag of tooth powder, the roll of cotton, and the pages of writing found during the search of our barracks room at Chusovoy. He said nothing, but placed them dramatically on the desk, one by one.

  If he had expected this to be a crushing blow, he was in for a disappointment. It was my turn to smile. “Do you deny that these belong to you?” he said at last. “No, they are mine.” “Then how can you deny you are a German spy and saboteur?” I told him the whole story: how I had bought the tooth powder in Chusovoy to brush my teeth, how I had taught the young boy in the camp his alphabet and how to form the letters. If the interrogator wanted to think there was something mysterious about the combinations on the page, that was his business, but anyone could see they had been written by a child. “As for the nitroglycerin,” I said, “go ahead and drink it. It’s Mass wine.”

  Without a word, he pushed the bottles and the packages to one side of his desk and resumed the questioning. Who were my contacts? What sort of information had I sent the Germans? If I was not a spy, why was I traveling under another name? Who was Nestrov? (So they did know about him.) Were Fuchs and Valery and Janocz also members of the spy ring? Where had I gone when I drove the truck at Teplaya-Gora? How did I receive messages from Germany? What did I know about German invasion plans?

  He must have gone over and over the same questions, like a dog chasing its tail, for at least an hour. From time to time, he made a note on a piece of paper in front of him. Finally, I told him once and for all I wasn’t a German spy, and that if he didn’t like my story, he could make up one of his own, since he had all the “facts.” With that, he slammed his hand on the desk and shouted for the guard outside the door. I thought for one panicky second I might be shot, but he ordered me back to my cell. The interview was over. I had a lot to think about, though.

  So began a series of interrogations that lasted through the period I was at Perm. Sometimes I’d be called out twice a day, sometimes not at all. The sessions might last anywhere from an hour to all day. The questions were always the same. Sometimes I’d have to sit bolt upright on the edge of the chair for hour after hour, and sometimes, if the interrogator didn’t like an answer, he’d give me a blow in the face that would send me sprawling on the floor.

  Two or three times in the months I was at Perm, the interrogator summoned a pair of guards and led me into an adjoining room with thick carpets on the floor and heavily padded walls. There I would be worked over with rubber clubs on the back of the head, and when I’d try to drop my head, I’d get a smashing blow to the face. The sessions were painful, but they never lasted more than a few minutes. The purpose seemed not so much to force me to talk—since no questions were asked during that time—but to soften me up so I would be more co-operative in answering the interrogator later, for fear of another beating.

  Several times, too, instead of being brought back to the large cell, I was put in a small, black room like a box, so pitch dark I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and stifling hot. I might be there an hour or overnight. I was told to think over the questions and my answers, and decide whether or not I might be able to remember a few more details of the “truth.”

  In the course of all these interrogations, it became evident they knew I was an American priest, a Jesuit from Lvov who had studied at Rome and crossed into Russia on a Polish passport. For some reason, the fact my Polish papers were false didn’t seem to interest them. They rarely mentioned the fact. When it did come up, they brushed it aside. They kept insisting that I was a German spy—conceivably the Vatican might be mixed up in the business somehow—and they wanted the details of my espionage. Nothing else mattered, and nothing else would do.

  Early one morning in August, the guard came into the cell and sang out my name. I shook my head, expecting another futile round of questioning, and answered, “Here!” “Come with me,” he barked, “and bring all your things.” That was a surprise. “All your things” was also something of a joke, because I had only a jacket, the clothes on my back, and a grubby little piece of bread I’d been saving since breakfast.

  Immediately, the oldtimers began to crowd around me. “That means you’re getting out,” they said. “You lucky devil!” Then they began to ask me to go to such-and-such an address, to try to get in touch with their wife or their family, or just to let people know where they were and that they were still alive. I promised to do the best I could and shuffled off to the door, dazed at this stroke of good luck and only half-believing it could be happening to me.

  The guard led me along the corridor and down into the basement, where he locked me into what we called a “box,” a little detention cell used for processing prisoners in or out of the prison, with one small window at the top of the door. Before he shut the door, he asked the two routine questions of identification: “What’s your name?” (“Lypinski, Wladimir Martinovich”) and “Your birthday?” (“November 4, 1910,” the date I used for Lypinski). He closed the door, but was back in a few moments to hand in a loaf of bread—a full loaf, about two and a half pounds—and six teaspoons of sugar rolled up in a paper cone. I was startled to find myself with so much bread all at once, and went to work on it right away without bothering to wonder what it was all about.

  I ate almost half the loaf before the door opened again and three men came in—a young, black-haired lieutenant in the uniform of the NKGB (split from the NKVD in 1941, after the war began, a special department of “security”) and two husky young guards in plain khaki dress. The lieutenant went through the routine again. “Your name?” “Lypinski, Wladimir Martinovich.” “Birthday?” “November 4, 1910.” “Charge against you?” “58:10:2.”3 “Come with us,” he ordered. And so I walked out of the prison at Perm for the last time. The lieutenant led the way; the two burly guards walked behind me.

  They took me to a waiting van in the prison courtyard. It was windowless, with a center aisle and metal-cage cabinets on each side just big enough for one man. There was barely enough room in the cage to stand, and it was impossible to sit. The motor started and we rattled off, the truck banging and lurching over the roads, and bouncing me around in the cage from wall to wall like the little marble in a pinball machine. We drove for perhaps fifteen minutes, then came to a sudden stop which slammed me against the front wall. I could hear the voices of the guards and the lieutenant reporting to someone.

  At last the door opened, and the lieutenant went through the routine all over again—name, birthday, charge—checking my answers this time against a set of papers. “All right,” he said as he unlocked the door of the cage, “get out!” I walked out the little aisle behind him and jumped off the tailgate. The two guards immediately formed up behind me, and the lieutenant led the way onto the platform of the railway station at Perm. “Stay close behind me,” he snapped, “and don’t look around.” We walked down to one end of the platform; I was surprised to see my suitcase standing there. We stopped. “Sit down on the luggage,” said the lieutenant, “keep quiet,” and again he added, “don’t look around!”

  I sat down on the suitcase, jealously holding my bread and sugar. When I heard someone walking our way quickly, I involuntarily looked around and caught a glimpse of a man who could have been Nestrov being pushed hurriedly by. Immediately the guard shouted, “Don’t look around!” So I straightened up and looked back over the tracks. There were other people on the platform glancing curiously in my direction, but they rather obviously avoided catching my eye if I looked at them. At the lieutenant’s orders, one of the guards went off to make whatever arrangements were necessary. I had no idea where I was going or why, and, to be honest, my whole concern at the moment was centered on that loaf of bread and those six teaspoons of sugar.

  When the train pulled alongside our platform, I was hustled by my guards toward one door o
f the car, again with the injunction “not to look around.” The car we boarded was a regular passenger car with individual compartments in the European fashion, and it was full, except for the last compartment. There were just two girls in it. “Stoil!” (Stop!) said the lieutenant as we approached their compartment; he walked in and ordered the girls to find a seat elsewhere. They grabbed their luggage and left hurriedly. No one in those days argued with the NKGB.

  The lieutenant ordered me to sit in the corner by the window. One of the guards threw my suitcase up on the rack. I slumped over near the window, hugging my precious loaf of bread. One guard sat next to me, the other sat in the corner seat across the compartment; the lieutenant stayed outside in the corridor. Since nobody seemed to mind, I looked out the window. It was my first contact in a long while with the outside world, even if through a train window, and it had a certain unreal aspect about it, as if I were looking at a movie.

  With two blasts of steam, the train began to move. I wasn’t certain in what direction we were headed, for I had completely lost my bearings. I couldn’t recognize the countryside, so I knew at least we weren’t headed east toward Chusovoy. The names of the towns along the route—Krasnokamsk, Vereschagino, Kez, Balezino, Glasov, Yar—were vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t until we pulled into Kirov next day that I knew for certain we were going west, in the direction of Moscow.

  After a while, I propped my head against the window frame as if I were asleep, and began to pray. This sort of mental prayer was what had kept me going until now; by means of it, I never lost courage. In the prison at Perm, as in the camps at Chusovoy and Teplaya-Gora, it had been my strength during the long night hours when sleep was sometimes impossible. I thought again of the lumber camps, of that other train ride into the Urals. It reminded me of my reasons for being here, of my resolve, no matter what the consequences, to do whatever I did only for God. He would sustain me. This thought—that no matter how lonely I was, I was never really alone—gave me courage again now.