With God in Russia: The Inspiring Classic Account of a Catholic Priest's Twenty-three Years in Soviet Prisons and Labor Camps

“. . . a human and historical document of compelling interest.” — The Atlantic

Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him.

While ministering in Eastern Europe during World War II, Polish-American priest Walter Ciszek, S.J., was arrested by the NKVD, the Russian secret police, shortly after the war ended. Accused of being an American spy and charged with "agitation with intent to subvert," he was held in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison for five years. The Catholic priest was then sentenced without trial to ten more years of hard labor and transported to Siberia, where he would become a prisoner within the forced labor camp system made famous in Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize—winning book The Gulag Archipelago.

In With God in Russia, Ciszek reflects on his daily life as a prisoner, the labor he endured while working in the mines and on construction gangs, his unwavering faith in God, and his firm devotion to his vows and vocation. Enduring brutal conditions, Ciszek risked his life to offer spiritual guidance to fellow prisoners who could easily have exposed him for their own gains. He chronicles these experiences with grace, humility, and candor, from his secret work leading mass and hearing confessions within the prison grounds, to his participation in a major gulag uprising, to his own "resurrection"—his eventual release in a prisoner exchange in October 1963 which astonished all who had feared he was dead.

“More than a superbly interesting adventure story, With God in Russia is a moving document of a man’s faith in his God and his God’s goodness in allowing him to live through his ordeal.” — The Advocate

Walter J. Ciszek, SJ (1904–1984), a native of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, was an American Jesuit missionary priest who spent twenty-three years in the Soviet Union before and during the Cold War.

Rev. James Martin, SJ, is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America magazine, consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication, and author of the New York Times bestsellers Learning to Pray, Jesus: A Pilgrimage, and The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. Father Martin is a frequent commentator in the national and international media, having appeared on all the major networks and outlets, like The Colbert Report, NPR’s Fresh Air, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.