Very Interesting Book!

I’ve just finished reading a most fascinating book about an American Jesuit priest who was imprisoned in Russia for over 20 years. His ordeal began in the early days of World War II and continued until he returned to the USA in the early 1960s.

His time in Russia included five years in solitary confinement in Moscow, followed by 15 years in a forced labor camp in Siberia.

What was fascinating to me was the priest’s mindset... that enabled him to survive and even thrive under such adverse circumstances.

The discipline of his training as a priest helped him order his days so that he didn’t go crazy. The prison system was geared to breaking a prisoner. In solitary confinement, he was stuck in a small room all day long, not permitted to talk, sit down, or lie on the bed until bedtime. His thoughts and reflections as he lived through this is fascinating. Then came the 15 years of slave labor when, against all odds, prisoners who had religious faith were sometimes able to encourage each other, even though they were given no free time in which to talk and mingle.

The book is interesting to me also because my own family history zigs and zags through many of the same places. My father, born in Poland in 1910, lived in Siberia with his mother and her family, during the First World War, while his father was in the army. Siberia was a childhood memory my father occasionally talked about. It was also where many of my mother’s relatives and neighbours ended up when Stalin confiscated their farmland, when my mother’s family was fortunate enough to immigrate to Canada.

The historic timelines of the book had special meaning for me, too. The author joined the Jesuits in 1928, the year my mother (at age 9) immigrated to Canada with her family. The author continued his religious training in Rome before going to Poland as a priest. In September 1938, the same month my mother began to teach in a one-room country school in the Peace River country in Alberta, war began in Europe and the author, who was at this time a priest in Poland, ended up in Russia with many Poles. Before long he was imprisoned as a “Vatican spy,” and his 20 years in prison began. 

After being released, he worked in Siberia as a priest. Then, after being forbidden from working in a church, he found a job as a car mechanic in southern Russia. He never expected to be allowed to return to the USA but a prisoner exchange brought that about - a year before I headed off to university.

The story is fascinating, not only because it shows how difficult political prisoners’ lives can be, but also because it reveals a survivor’s mindset.