The book begins in 1938 as Father Ciszek, who has been
ordained in the
Byzantine Rite, serves in a mission in a part of Poland occupied by the Soviets. He volunteers to go
incognito, using the alias "Wladimir Lypinski", as a worker with Polish laborers and families enticed into Russia's interior to work in the
Ural Mountains. On the way he stops in
Lviv,
Ukraine and gets permission for his new mission from the elderly
Andrey Sheptytsky,
Metropolitan Archbishop of the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. In 1940 he reaches his destination, a
lumber camp near
Chusovoy,
Perm Krai, Russia. After the onset of
World War II, however, the secret police (
NKVD) identify Ciszek as a priest and arrest him under a charge of "agitation with intent to subvert". For the next five years Ciszek is confined to
Moscow prisons, including the notorious
Lubyanka, and then, without
trial, is sentenced to ten more years as "a spy of the
Vatican". He is then sent to labor camps north of the
Arctic Circle in
Dudinka and
Norilsk, where he works in the mines and in construction gangs. He also takes part in
Norilsk uprising in 1953. Long presumed dead by his family and his superiors in the United States, in October 1963 Father Ciszek is exchanged along with another American for two convicted Soviet
secret agents. ==References==