He Leadeth Me

Walter J. Ciszek, a Jesuit priest, returned to the United States on October 12, 1963, after 23 years in the Soviet Union, most of them spent in prison or Siberian labor camps. Officially listed as dead since 1947, he was returned as part of an exchange for two convicted Russian spies. Upon his arrival, Ciszek wrote his first book, With God in Russia, a factual account of his years in the Soviet Union. He Leadeth Me, however, is the book he truly wanted to write: not a chronicle of events but an account of what he learned spiritually through suffering, intended to help others who face evil, despair, and hardship. He credits his collaborator, Father Daniel L. Flaherty, S.J., as indispensable to the project.

Ciszek traces his path to Russia from its origins. After joining the Jesuits in 1928, he volunteered for the "Russian missions" in 1929 in response to a letter from Pope Pius XI asking seminarians to prepare for work in Russia. He studied theology at the Russicum, a specialized seminary in Rome for training priests in Eastern rite ministry, and learned to say Mass in the Byzantine rite. When no way could be found to send priests into Russia, he was assigned to an Oriental rite Jesuit mission in Albertyn, Poland.

On October 17, 1939, the Red Army occupied Albertyn. The Jesuit mission that had flourished for 10 years was destroyed in weeks through arrests, property confiscations, and a sustained campaign against the Church. Ciszek argues that God's apparent abandonment was actually a manifestation of special providence, designed to wean his people from trust in worldly powers. He concludes that crises serve as reminders that believers must "seek first the kingdom of God and his justice" (22).

Father Makar, a Georgian Jesuit and former classmate, arrived with a plan for Jesuits to accompany labor brigades into the Soviet Union to minister to workers' spiritual needs. Ciszek felt overwhelming joy, recalling his sense of calling during his novitiate. Yet agonizing second thoughts followed. When he decided to stay in Albertyn, the decision brought no peace; his prayer became nearly impossible. When he reconsidered, praying for total openness to God's will, peace returned immediately. He discerned that the movements of the soul, peace versus turmoil, serve as signs of God's genuine intervention when they follow upon authentic abandonment rather than self-will. He resolved to go to Russia.

On March 19, Ciszek and Father Victor Nestrov, another Russicum classmate, crossed the Russian border in a boxcar under assumed identities. Arrival at the Ural lumber town of Teplaya-Gora shattered their euphoria. Conditions were primitive, the labor grueling, and no one would discuss God for fear of informers. Their sole consolation was the Mass, celebrated secretly in the forest using a tree stump as an altar. Reflecting on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, Ciszek reaches a transformative insight: God's will is not hidden somewhere beyond their circumstances but is revealed precisely in the concrete realities of each day. Their frustration had stemmed from expecting God's will to match their own vision rather than accepting the actual situation as his will for them. This principle becomes the guiding truth of the rest of the book.

On June 22, 1941, the NKVD (Soviet secret police) arrested Ciszek and Nestrov as German spies. Ciszek was taken to the district prison at Perm and then transferred to Moscow's Lubianka Prison as a "Vatican spy," where he spent five years mostly in solitary confinement. To impose order on formless days, he created a daily schedule modeled on Jesuit routines: meditation, Mass prayers recited by heart, examinations of conscience, and rosaries. Lubianka became, he reflects, a school of prayer.

The interrogation process, however, broke him. After months of sessions lasting up to 48 hours, a seemingly gentle interrogator persuaded the exhausted Ciszek to "cooperate." At the final session, paralyzed by fear when the interrogator threatened execution, Ciszek signed a fabricated dossier. Through prayer, he confronts the root of his failure: He had trusted in his own strong will while merely asking God for assistance on his own terms. He compares his experience to Saint Peter's denials and concludes that the greatest grace God can give a self-reliant man is a trial that exceeds his own powers.

Four more years of interrogation followed. The interrogators proposed elaborate schemes, including a mission to Rome as intermediary between the Kremlin and the Vatican. Ciszek grew increasingly depressed until he reached total despair, losing all hope and, for one terrible moment, losing sight of God entirely. He turned to prayer and was consoled by Christ's words in the Garden of Gethsemane. He experienced what he calls a conversion: total self-abandonment to God's will. Previously, he had seen himself as the master of his own destiny; now he understood that the situations themselves are God's will, to be accepted with complete trust. When asked to sign an espionage agreement, he spontaneously refused and felt no fear.

Ciszek left Lubianka for the long journey to Siberia, arriving at the arctic port of Dudinka, where he was immediately put to work shoveling coal for 12 to 15 hours a day. Through years of exhaustion, hunger, and extreme cold, he develops a profound respect for the human body, arguing against ascetic traditions that despise the flesh and reflecting on the Incarnation as proof that the body is a vehicle of redemption. He reframes work itself as participation in God's creative act, recalling that Christ was a village carpenter for some 20 years.

Despite constant surveillance and punishment, Ciszek functioned as a priest in the camps. He celebrated Mass secretly, heard confessions, and ministered to the dying. Catholic prisoners of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Latvian descent formed camp "parishes," guarding priests and standing watch during Mass. Wine for the Eucharist arrived through smuggling chains stretching from Ukrainian nuns to sympathetic truck drivers. Ciszek also organized retreats using the Spiritual Exercises, emphasizing that God's kingdom has always spread through daily, hidden labors rather than spectacular crusades.

During a prisoner revolt at Camp 5 in Norilsk, Ciszek was herded to a sandpit where soldiers lined up with rifles raised. A distant shot halted the execution at the last moment. He reflects that his panic was largely physical instinct rather than a failure of faith and contrasts the Christian understanding of death, conquered by Christ's resurrection, with the Communist treatment of death as the end of all existence.

After nearly 15 years, Ciszek was released from the camp at Kayerkhan. He reflects that the deepest freedom, free will, can never be confined, and that the highest freedom comes paradoxically from total abandonment to God's will. In Norilsk, he built a thriving parish with two fellow former prisoner-priests, Father Viktor and Father Neron, culminating in a triumphant Easter celebration. The KGB (the successor agency to the NKVD) promptly expelled him. Subsequent assignments in Krasnoyarsk and then Abakan followed the same pattern: Ciszek gathered a flock, ministered quietly, and was forced to move on. In Abakan, working as an auto mechanic, he engaged ordinary Soviet citizens in discussions about the meaning of life, presenting the Christian narrative as an alternative to questions Communist ideology could not answer.

In his closing reflections, Ciszek acknowledges that some readers may find his message too simple. He restates the catechism truth that man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God, interpreting it to mean that God has a special purpose for every individual through every circumstance of every day. Every moment of life has dignity, and no moment can be wasted. He frames total abandonment to God's will as the answer to yearnings for peace and fulfillment, closing with a prayer that his testimony may help others share what he calls "the only secret I have come to know" (208).