the codebooks from his office and passing them to the Soviets. Ironically, Kurtna and Ciszek met one another again in 1948 as fellow political prisoners in Norillag. In 1937, Ciszek was ordained a priest in the Byzantine Rite in Rome taking the name of Vladimir. In 1938, Ciszek was sent to the Jesuit mission in Albertyn in eastern Poland. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland and forced Ciszek to close his mission. Arriving in Lviv, he realized that it would be easy for a priest to enter the Soviet Union amid the streams of exiles going East. After securing the permission of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, he crossed the border in 1940 under the assumed identity of Władymyr Łypynski. With two of his fellow Jesuits, he traveled by train to the logging town of Chusovoy, in the Ural Mountains. For one year, he worked as an unskilled logger while discreetly performing religious ministry at the same time. Captivity in the Soviet Union Ciszek was arrested in 1941 under false accusations of espionage for Nazi Germany and the Vatican. To Ciszek's shock, the NKVD already knew his real name and that he was an American citizen and a Catholic priest. He was then sent to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, the national headquarters of the NKVD (secret police agency). He spent five years there, most of them in solitary confinement. In 1942, he signed a confession under severe torture to espionage and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in the GULAG. Ciszek was to remain in Lubyanka for four more years. In 1946, he was sent by train to Krasnoyarsk then 20 days by boat north on the Yenisei River until reaching 300km above the Arctic Circle to the city of Norilsk, the center of the labor camp complex known as Norillag. There, Fr. Ciszek was forced to load coal onto freighter vessels and later transferred to working in coal mines located in the Permafrost. A year later, he was sent to work on the construction of a nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, and palladium ore refinery. From 1953 to 1955, he worked in mines. His memoirs provide a vivid description of the Norilsk uprising, which started at Gorlag spread through Norillag in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin's death. Throughout his lengthy imprisonment, Ciszek continued to pray, to offer both the Tridentine