349 Walter Ciszek, S.J. Following Twenty-Four Years in the Soviet
Book Reviews 349 Walter Ciszek, S.J. With God in America: The Spiritual Legacy of an Unlikely Jesuit. John DeJak and Marc Lindeijer, S.J., eds. Chicago,: Loyola Press, 2016. Pp. 264. Pb, $19.95. Following twenty-four years in the Soviet Union, most of it spent in the prisons of Moscow and labor camps of Siberia administered by the Soviet secret police in its various manifestations, from nkvd (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Stalin’s secret police) to kgb (Committee for State Security, the secret police’s name from 1954 onwards), Father Walter Ciszek, a Polish-American Je- suit priest, returned to the United States of America on October 2, 1963. For much of his time in the ussr, his order and his family and friends assumed he, like so many others swept up by Stalin’s henchmen, had died during his captivity. Ciszek was not able contact them until 1955, two years after the So- viet dictator’s death, and would not obtain his release for another eight more years, as the Kennedy administration arranged the transfer of both Ciszek and the American graduate student Marvin Makinen for two Soviet agents, United Nations functionary Ivan Egorov and his wife Alexandra, who has been arrest- ed by the fbi in 1961 for espionage. Upon his return Ciszek would take up a position at the John xxiii Center at Fordham University, his home for much of the rest of his life. Almost immediately upon his arrival Ciszek became an American celebrity. During the height of the Cold War he was a rare person who had first-hand knowledge not only of daily life in the ussr, but one of its most closely guarded secrets, the vast network of labor camps known as the Gulag.
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