Nearly half a century after being arrested and sentenced by the Stalinist regime to a year and a half imprisonment for “anti-state” crimes, the Polish Supreme Court annulled the sentence issued in 1954 against an Adventist pastor, Konrad Janyszka, reports Andrzej Sicinski, spokesman for the Polish Seventh-day Adventist Church. The court’s decision ended a three-year process after he filed for annulment of the 1954 decision.

Janyszka was accused of “disseminating false information” that allegedly aimed to “significantly erode the interests of the Polish state,” public “showing of slides,” considered to be protected by state censorship, and for possession of printed materials for the use of Adventist clergy, alleged as intended to be hidden from the state authorities.

In an interview for the Adventist News Network, Janyszka, now 79 and still mending his health from the time in prison, said that after hearing of the court’s decision he “knelt down and thanked God that justice was served.” Janyszka was imprisoned two weeks after his second daughter was born and was denied receiving letters from his family. They were allowed to visit him only once. “They did not allow me to have a Bible and ridiculed my keeping the Sabbath,” he said.

“When I got to prison the first thing I did was to fast. I prayed that the Lord would sustain me. And He did. He was close to me and helped me go through it all,” he said. The biggest challenge for Janyszka was to survive on a diet that he mostly could not eat. “Toward the end of the sentence I landed in a hospital when they had to force-feed me. They did not want me to leave the prison as skinny as I became,” he reminisced.

Janyszka was arrested on July 3, 1953, and released Jan. 3, 1955. “I served the entire sentence, up to the minute,” he commented.

Sicinski reports that the Supreme Court considered an appeal to annul the 1954 judgment, and ruled that the sentence represented a flagrant breaking of the law by the authorities of that time.

The ruling explains that such charges, as those leveled against Janyszka, did not substantially prove the pastor’s intention to disseminate false information. Statements and acts of the Adventist pastor expressed “only his private evaluation of the situation and a critique of the then reality, as well as a presentation of his religious views.”

The court further stated that Janyszka acted within the parameters of the guaranteed right to freedom of religion and belief, and a free exercise of religion in a personally chosen form.

Janyszka’s ordeal was not an isolated case of the severely restrictive years of Communism in Poland. All churches were affected, including Roman Catholics.  Also in 1953, Cardinal Wyszynski, the Catholic Primate, was arrested. The Adventist Church’s seminary was also temporarily closed. The repression pushed the churches to “underground” activities.

Recalling the ordeal of imprisonment, Janyszka spoke of his faith that was also on trial. “My faith did not weaken,” he said. He recalled that six months before the end of his sentence, he was informed about arrests of three other Adventist pastors: Wiktor Ciuk, Egon Kulesa and Andrzej Maszczak, a seminary director. “I was not happy about this,” he said. “[I concluded] that it wasn’t just a fight with me. They were fighting with the church. They were fighting with Christ’s church.”

The court annulment is one of many restitutions awarded to religious groups and acted upon by the Polish state after the fall of Communism.