With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  After a while, though, we settled down a bit. The soldiers began to play checkers or dominoes, while the others stood around kibitzing. Nikita took on one young soldier at chess, and since I had played a little of the game, I drifted over to watch. Nikita had him mated in no time. He did the same with another soldier, then laughed and called out, “Next!” I thought the soldiers must be rank amateurs, so I sat down. By the time I had made five moves, it was mate. Nikita laughed.

  In three minutes, I lost two other games, to Nikita’s delight, and I told him he was a real master at the game. “No, no, no, tovarisch,” he said, “you’re just all bad players. None of you know the theory of the game. So gather around here, brothers, and I’ll show you how it’s done.” With that he proceeded to lecture us on the theory of chess. If I remember him correctly, he said there were sixty-four basic moves you had to know by heart. With those moves, you would never lose a game against most normal players.

  “Now, have you got that?” he said. “I’ll tell you what. All of you get here around the desk and figure out your moves; I’ll take on the whole seven of you at once. Take all the time you want to decide your moves. I’ll go over on the bed and read a book. When you’re ready, just call out the position of the pieces and I’ll give you a countermove.”

  Nikita took a book and went over on the bed while we brain trusters held our consultations. When we would call out a move, he’d look up from the book and almost immediately call out a countermove. We were doing fine until about the fifteenth or sixteenth move. Then, when Nikita called out his countermove, we could see we were in trouble, so we changed his move without telling him. On his next move he called, “Check!”

  “What do you mean?” we said. “Nothing of the kind!” “It’s got to be check,” he answered with a grin, “and the next move is mate; there’s nothing you can do about it!” Still on the bed, he described where every piece should be on the board. “No,” we said, “that isn’t where your bishop is. There’s no check.” “Oh well, then there’s something funny here,” he said and, still without getting up, proceeded to play the game from memory, move by move and piece by piece.

  For all the pleasant associations, though, I found it much harder to pray in this cell or to perform the other spiritual duties I had set for myself. In order to make a meditation, for instance, I’d take a book and sit down on the bed, pretending to read, turning the pages from time to time, but actually praying. Then, in the afternoon, I’d pace around the cell saying my rosaries with my hands in my pockets, counting off the beads on my fingers.

  One afternoon, our atheist, Porphyry, asked me to talk with him for a while about God. He knew I was a Catholic, but not that I was a priest. That conversation practically developed into a seminar, with regular afternoon sessions. Porphyry would quote from memory all the seeming contradictions in the Bible he had learned in his courses for atheistic propaganda. I’d try patiently to explain them, pointing out the background and context of the Bible passages, plus all the details of the argument I could remember from my own courses in theology.

  In a way, it was stimulating and challenging, almost a review of biblical theology, but it was not very satisfying. I think Porphyry was out to convert me, or perhaps he was just brushing up on his technique. In any event, whenever I’d answer one objection or be just on the verge of getting him to admit a particular point, he would immediately jump to a new objection. He had the knack of meeting an answer to his objection by skipping to a completely different problem. “Well,” he’d say, “that may be so, but what about this . . . ?”

  Then, one afternoon in April 1945, I was told to pack up and be ready to move. I thought perhaps the time had come when I’d be leaving for the prison camps. My hopes, however, were short-lived. I was simply transferred to a different section of Lubianka. Here, on what I estimated was the first floor, I was all alone. I began again my daily order of prayer and reading, trying as best I could to adjust once more to the life of a hermit. It was hard to be alone again. I kept busy, but I knew I was just killing time. I hadn’t been interrogated in over a year. Why hadn’t I long ago been packed off to the labor camps?

  Here again I had little contact with anyone. I wasn’t called out for interrogation; the guards were not supposed to talk to prisoners. I began to experience once more that feeling of timelessness—and what was worse, of purposelessness—as the days went on and on, always with the same routine. And yet, I never lost sight of God’s Providence. I knew that nothing was too small or insignificant in life when looked on from the standpoint of His will. At least, I tried to keep sight of that. Lubianka was a hard school, but a good one. I learned there the lesson which would keep me going in the years to come: religion, prayer, and love of God do not change reality, but they give it a new meaning. In Lubianka I grew firmer in my conviction that whatever happened in my life was nothing else than a reflection of God’s will for me. And He would protect me.

  One evening in May, about 8:30, while I was in the midst of my evening prayers, I was startled to hear the cheering of a crowd. I hurried over to the window. I could see only the blackness of the sky, but I strained to pick out voices in the crowd. Suddenly, from somewhere quite close, came the sound of cannons firing. There was the roar of planes sweeping low overhead and then, to my amazement, fireworks! I could see reflections of the various colors in my little patch of sky. I stood there entranced. I was also amazed that the guard hadn’t looked in, or said something to me about staying at the window so long. I wondered if there had been a great victory somewhere.

  All at once, there was silence. The echoes of the crowd, still reverberating in the courtyard of the prison, slowly died away. Then I could make out a loud voice echoing in the night with the peculiar metallic ring of a loudspeaker, addressing the people in an elevated and thankful tone. But the words banged out so loudly they were garbled in their own echo; I couldn’t make anything out clearly. Yet I knew the noise must be coming from Krasnoya Ploschad (Red Square), and I grew increasingly excited and curious. For a long time after silence finally fell in the darkness, I lay in bed distracted, wondering, unable to get to sleep.

  About midnight, I heard the guards change in the corridor. Shortly afterward, a young girl who was new to our floor came into my cell and asked if anything was wrong. “I’ve been watching you,” she said, “you’re restless. Do you want a doctor?” “No, I’m not sick,” I said, “just curious about the crowds outside. I’ve been lying here trying to figure out what’s going on.” “Don’t you know?” she asked excitedly. I shook my head. “Tovarisch! The war is over! The Germans have surrendered! It was announced tonight!”

  Then she went on to tell me that she had been outside, watching the parade in Red Square, before she came on duty. She described the victory celebration in detail. I knew our conversation was against the rules, and I was grateful to her. It was the first time any of the guards had shown me a soft and friendly side—they had never been cruel, just business-like—and it was also the last.

  Now that the war was over, I wondered what would happen. I never dared to hope that I would be released. I knew I had ultimately been convicted of spying for the Vatican, not the Germans; that verdict, and my sentence, would no doubt still stand. But there was a chance, I thought, that the atmosphere of the prison might change for the better. Yet no change took place; the days passed. May gave way to summer, then to fall. The cold settled into the prison walls again.

  It was October before anything happened. One afternoon, just before supper, the guard told me to pack my things. I was led from the first floor to an upper floor, then to a cell midway down the corridor. There were two people already in the room—one of them was Nestrov! This time I walked in on him, as he had done to me at Butirka. Again, we were overjoyed.

  After a moment of emotion, Nestrov introduced me to his cellmate. He was a Frenchman named Champon, a gifted writer and a candidate for the French Academy, who impressed me immediately with his gentlemanly bearing and ar
istocratic manners. A man of medium height, slightly taller than I, he had a long thin nose, firmly chiseled jaw, and thin, crisp lips. His long blond hair, streaked with red, was just balding back from a widow’s peak. He had the French aristocrat’s elegant hands, with long tapering fingers, and tiny feet.

  Champon was a great talker. He had been in prison for about a year, and his story was a strange one. Like me, he had been accused of spying. Actually, he said, he’d been in China and other countries in the East, to photograph backgrounds for a movie he was producing based on the story of one of his own novels. He told us he’d been offered a half-million dollars for the movie rights, of which the NKGB had “confiscated” $400,000 when he was arrested. He had been returning to France through Russia in order to avoid the long trip around Africa.

  It was a great story, but I thought it didn’t quite ring true. Champon said he’d had only a two-week travel visa to journey through the U.S.S.R., yet he spoke Russian extremely well. That made me a bit suspicious of his story, but I never asked him the obvious question. You never ask such questions in prison.

  In this cell, we received an extra bread ration of 150 grams. We also got two blocks of sugar in the morning with our boiled water, and twice a week there might be three little raw fish with the evening meal. The extra food was certainly welcome. I began to feel somewhat stronger and a good bit more chipper. In this part of the prison, too, the heating conditions were much better; the cell remained reasonably warm all during that winter of 1945–1946.

  To pass the time, we began discussions. Champon lectured on etymology—he knew several languages besides French and Russian—on painting, and on film production. Nestrov lectured on philosophy, Oriental liturgy, and the Slavonic languages. I concentrated on English and, after my course at Lubianka “University,” on Russian literature. One language Champon didn’t know was English, so he and I began to instruct one another. I taught him English and he improved my French; every day we learned twenty new words. Since it was all done without pencil and paper, our memories got a good workout as our vocabularies increased.

  All during this time, too, we were careful to attend to our regular spiritual duties—weekly confessions, morning and night prayers, a sermon every Sunday. Champon was a good Catholic, and he entered wholeheartedly into what he laughingly referred to as our “Jesuit community.” “I’ve heard and read a great many things about Jesuits,” he said, “and here I am living the Jesuit life for a while.”

  In these pleasant associations, winter turned into spring. Then, at the end of May, Champon was called out one afternoon for interrogation. When he returned, he was strangely noncommittal; he wouldn’t say anything definite about his session. I suspected immediately he had been questioned about us. That same evening, Nestrov was called out. He returned looking depressed. “What happened?” I said. He glanced at Champon, shook his head, and didn’t want to talk about it.

  A day or so passed, then Nestrov was called out again. He returned from this session even more depressed. He told me in passing that they were really putting the pressure on him, proposing various deals and trying to play on his patriotic sentiment as a Russian. With Champon there, he refused to say any more. I felt something strange was going on. The atmosphere in the cell had changed completely; Champon was uncommunicative and Nestrov began to brood. And when Nestrov, the Russian, fell into one of these black moods of depression, you needed a bulldozer to dig him out. I tried to encourage him in a general way, but since I had no idea of the specific propositions he was facing, I couldn’t offer any advice.

  The very next day, just before noon, I was called out. I distinctly recall the peculiar feeling which came over me after having been so long away from this sort of thing—a mixture of tension and extreme repugnance. The interrogator was a stern man, in his late forties, with goldrimmed glasses and flecks of gray in his hair. I had never seen him before, but he opened the session by saying, “Well, now this is your last chance. Have you changed your mind?” He was obviously familiar with the Ciszek dossier. “What I have told you is the truth,” I answered. “What is there to change?”

  Without another word, the interrogator picked up the phone, called the guard, and put the receiver slowly back on the hook, as if it were a gesture of finality. When the guard entered, he simply said, “Take him away.” I was led, not back to the cell, but down to a detention box. What now?

  I was wearing only a pair of heavy socks, and the cement floor in the basement was cold. The guard came back with my suitcase and another small bag. All at once, I knew this wasn’t a shift from one cell to another; I was being transferred again, at least to another prison. So I told the guard I hadn’t had any dinner and pointed out that I had no shoes. The ones I had been wearing ever since Chusovoy were at last being repaired in Lubianka. “All right,” he said and went out. He came back shortly with a bowl of soup, then went to find my shoes. He returned to tell me that they were not in the repair shop and not in my cell. He couldn’t find them, and he had done all he could.

  While I sat there waiting, wondering what was ahead, I hurriedly ate the soup so I would finish it before I was led away. But my thoughts kept turning constantly to Nestrov. Quite frankly, I was worried about him; I had never seen him quite so depressed. I said a prayer there in the detention box that he would be all right. I never saw him again. After a short while the door opened, the guard asked the routine three questions, and ordered me to follow him. So, bag in hand and wearing only my heavy socks, I walked out of Lubianka for the last time.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the Prison Camps of Norilsk

  EN ROUTE TO SIBERIA

  I WALKED BEHIND the guard to a waiting prison van. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and hot for June in Moscow. For the time being at least, my lack of shoes created no problem. There were already people sitting in the van when I climbed in. Despite the guard’s admonitions, we began talking at once. Then three young women climbed into the van with babies in their arms and conversation stopped. We immediately stood up to give them a seat, and everyone crowded around for a peek at the babies.

  The women didn’t seem at all disturbed. They were eager to talk. The babies, they said, were only a few months old and had actually been born in prison. We didn’t go into the details. The babies, though, didn’t like the crowds and the commotion. They protested quite vocally, crying until their little faces were red with the effort. Their mothers produced bottles of milk prepared by the prison doctors, and we all watched in a sort of happy and crowded conspiracy while the youngsters settled down in contentment.

  By this time, the van had been standing a long while in the courtyard, with the sun beating down on the roof and no air to speak of in the crowded compartment. The atmosphere was stifling. We were sweating profusely and some of the prisoners began to get dizzy, weak as they were after a long stretch in prison. We started banging on the doors, calling for the guards to open up and let in some air or bring some water. They did neither, but in a few minutes the van lurched off.

  We drove to Moscow station and stopped next to a long line of railroad cars. I didn’t get a good look ahead, but I counted at least ten cars behind the one I boarded. These were jail cars, with compartments like European passenger cars, but they had no windows and the compartment doors to the corridor were simply iron grills. Guards, mostly young army fellows, were stationed at the ends of each car.

  I was put into a compartment which already had more than twenty people in it. As I walked in the door, my suitcase and bag were snatched from my hand; I was told to sit in the corner. It happened so fast I hardly had time to react. I looked around and immediately recognized my traveling companions for what they were: young thieves and criminals with a law and order all their own, who figured that everyone else was fair game. When I sat down in the corner, though, I found my bag and bundle had been put there, too.

  For the most part, the thieves and common criminals I was to meet stood out quite markedly from the political
prisoners, whom they despised. They had long ago learned how to make the best of situations in which they found themselves. They showed little respect for anyone, especially the guards, whom they constantly badgered and from whom they took very little abuse without retaliating in kind. Among themselves, though, they took orders from anyone strong enough to lead them.

  The leader of this particular gang was a short, dark little fellow with shifty eyes black as coal. He was wearing only an undershirt and trousers, with some sort of hempen sandals on his feet. His arms and hands, even his chest where it was visible through the undershirt, were completely tattooed. Afraid of no one, he delighted in baiting the guards. At every station, he’d bang on the grill and ask for water or a smoke or something to eat. He would even outline the menu he preferred. If the guards ignored him, he’d keep it up until at last he had provoked some sort of reply.

  I sat quietly in my corner, trying to guard my luggage. The thieves kept eyeing me, and eventually two of the leader’s cronies crossed over to sit next to me. Then they told me to sit some place else because there wasn’t room for all of us. I was the only political prisoner in this den of thieves, so I moved. Immediately, they opened my suitcase, looked over everything and put certain articles aside. They picked out a sweater, a few shirts, some new underwear—with a few passing remarks to amuse the crowd. Finally, they closed the suitcase and told me to go back and sit down.

  They took the spoils over to the leader, who winked at them, got up, and banged at the door. When the guard came, the leader leaned out and whispered to him. The guard shook his head. I couldn’t hear much over the noise of the train, and the whistling and shouting among the thieves, but I gathered the leader wanted to make some sort of deal—my clothes for food. “A nice clean job in broad daylight,” I thought to myself. Yet there was no use complaining to the guard; I’d be in this compartment for a while at least and there was no telling what revenge the thieves might take.