Walter Joseph Ciszek, S.J. (November 4, 1904 – December 8, 1984) was a Polish-American Jesuit priest of the Russian Greek Catholic Church who conducted clandestine missionary work in the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1963. Fifteen of these years were spent in confinement and hard labor in the Gulag, plus five preceding them in Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison. He was released and returned to the United States in 1963, after which he wrote two books, including the memoir With God in Russia, and served as a spiritual director. Since 1990, Ciszek's life has been under consideration by the Catholic Church for beatification. His current title is Servant of God. Early life and studies Ciszek was born on November 4, 1904, in the mining town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, to Polish immigrants Mary (Mika) and Martin Ciszek, who had emigrated to the United States in the 1890s from Galicia in Austria-Hungary. A former street gang member, he shocked his family by deciding to become a priest. Ciszek entered the Jesuit novitiate in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1928. The following year, he volunteered to serve as a missionary to Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution had taken place 12 years before. Christians were being openly persecuted there, and few believers had access to a priest. Pope Pius XI made an appeal to priests from around the world to go to Russia as missionaries. In 1934, Ciszek was sent to Rome to study theology and Russian, the history of Russia and liturgy at the Pontifical Russian College (or 'Russicum'), 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. His fellow Russicum seminarians included Alexander Kurtna, a convert from Estonian Orthodoxy whom Ciszek referred to in his memoirs only by the codename "Misha". Following his expulsion by the Russicum's Rector in 1940, Kurtna worked, with only one interruption, between 1940 and 1944 as a translator for the Vatican's Congregation for the Eastern Churches. During those same years, Kurtna covertly spied for the Soviet NKVD, with devastating results for Walter Ciszek and many other underground priests and faithful. Kurtna, who was always loyal to the USSR, only started spying for Nazi Germany in 1943 because his handler, SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, threatened otherwise to send Kurtna and his wife to a concentration camp. Kurtna, however, turned the tables on Kappler by stealing