Walter Ciszek was released and returned to the United States in 1963, after which he wrote two books, Walter Ciszek Leadeth Me and the memoir With God in Russia, and served as a spiritual director.
16 Facts About Walter Ciszek
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Walter Ciszek was born on November 4,1904, in the mining town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, to Polish immigrants Mary and Martin Walter Ciszek, who had emigrated to the US in the 1890s from Galicia in Austria-Hungary.
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Walter Ciszek entered the Jesuit novitiate in Hyde Park, New York in 1928.
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In 1934, Walter Ciszek was sent to Rome to study theology, Russian, the history of Russia and liturgy at the Pontifical Russian College, a Jesuit-run seminary established to train priests of the Russian Greek Catholic Church for missionary work in the Soviet Union and the Russian diaspora.
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Kurtna and Walter Ciszek met one another again in 1948 as fellow political prisoners in Norillag.
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In 1937, Walter Ciszek was ordained a priest in the Byzantine Rite in Rome and took the name Vladimir.
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In 1938, Walter Ciszek was sent to the Jesuit mission in Albertyn in eastern Poland.
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Walter Ciszek was arrested in 1941 under false accusations of espionage for Nazi Germany and the Vatican.
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Walter Ciszek was then sent to Lubyanka prison in Moscow, the NKVD's national headquarters.
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Walter Ciszek spent five years there, most of them in solitary confinement.
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Walter Ciszek was to remain in Lubyanka for four more years.
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Walter Ciszek's memoirs provide a vivid description of the Norilsk uprising, which started at Gorlag spread through Norillag in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin's death.
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Walter Ciszek remained oblivious until he was flown to Moscow and delivered to a US State Department official, who told him that he was still an American citizen.
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In 1965, Walter Ciszek began working and lecturing at the John XXIII Center at Fordham University, counseling and offering spiritual direction to those who visited him.
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On December 8,1984, Walter Ciszek died after many years of declining health and was buried at the Jesuit Cemetery in Wernersville, Pennsylvania.
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In 1985, a Carmelite nun, Marija, who was the mother superior of a Ruthenian Rite Carmelite nunnery which Walter Ciszek helped found, and which had been under his spiritual direction, began to petition for his formal canonization.