Kazimierz Świątek

Who was Kazimierz Świątek?

Kazimierz Cardinal Świątek was a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who was most known for his resistance to Cold War-era Soviet Communism and for his service in Minsk, Belarus. Cardinal Swiatek was the former Metropolitan Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev, and Apostolic Administrator of Pinsk.

Świątek was born to Polish parents in the municipality of Walk, in what was then the Russian Empire, the present-day municipality of Valga, Estonia. His family was deported to Siberia during the Russian Revolution. His father died fighting in the Polish-Soviet War. The future Cardinal lived in newly independent Poland from 1922. After completing his philosophical and theological studies at the seminary in Pinsk, Świątek was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1939, and then was sent to the parish of Prużany.

The Soviet Union occupied Pinsk after the Nazi-Soviet Pact divided Poland in 1939. Świątek was arrested by the NKVD in April 1941, and held on death row in Brest for two months. Father Świątek escaped from prison, taking advantage of the confusion caused by the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and returned to Pruzhany. In December 1944, the NKVD arrested Swiatek for a second time. The following year he was sentenced to 10 years hard labor in a concentration camp, and spent nine years in Siberia and the north of the Soviet Union, working in the taiga and in the mines. After his release in June 1954, he returned to Pinsk.