My Thirty-Third Year

By Gerhard A. Fittkau Winter 1945: the Soviet army sweeps through the village of Suess­enberg. After desecrating the church, pillaging the homes, raping and killing women and children, the Soviets deport the remaining people and their pastor, Fr. Fittkau, to the gulag in Siberia. The burden of My Thirty-Third Year is the story of their unbounded suffering: the starvation and cold, the brutal toil, the specter of death, and the persistent temptation to despair. Throughout the ordeal, Fr. Fittkau maintains his priestly vocation, tending to the needs of his fellow prisoners, aided by his friends—the Protestant minister Theo, Fr. Kolfenbach, and Sr. Imelda. The ultimate source of sustenance, however, and source of the book’s enduring power, is “the fruits of God’s victorious grace…grown in the garden of Christ’s agony.” I was not different in my wretched appearance, in my physical misery, in my struggle to stay alive, in my material helplessness than any prisoner in the camp. Yet my pries