Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek, the retired Archbishop of Minsk, Belarus, died in Pinsk on July 21 at the age of 96.

Born in 1914 in what is now Estonia, Kazimierz Swiatek was ordained to the priesthood in 1939. That same year he was accused of espionage, found guilty in Stalinist show trial, and sentenced to death. He escaped execution when German troops temporarily gained control of the territory, but in December 1944, with the Soviet Union again controlling Belarus, he was arrested again, and in July 1945, was sentenced to 10 years’ forced labor in Maryinsk gulag.

In an interview with Aid to the Church in Need, Cardinal Swiatek said: “It was a death sentence. We worked in temperatures down to minus 40 degrees, felling timber, and slept as many as 300 people at a time, in a Semlanka — a hole in the ground with a makeshift covering — without any light and without anything.

“They told us a bullet would be wasted on us, since we would die here anyway, and so until then we could carry on working. Exhaustion, hunger and cold brought death to many.

“In the mornings, before we began work, the dead were thrown out into the snow. The wolves came in the night and ate up the bodies.

“When they saw I was still alive after three years, they sent me to Vorkuta. There it was winter for 12 months of the year.”

After the death of Stalin in 1954, he was released and went to work as parish priest in Pinsk.

After the fall of the Soviet empire, when the Catholic Church emerged from decades of repression, Father Swiatek was named Archbishop of Minsk in 1991. Three years later, he was elevated to the College of Cardinals by Pope John Paul II. He continued to lead the Minsk archdiocese until finally retiring in 2006 at the age of 91.

Cardinal Swiatek had been the 2nd-oldest living cardinal-surpassed in age only by Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, the former Archbishop of Ravenna, Italy, who is 97.

With the death of Cardinal Swiatek there are now 196 members of the College of Cardinals, of whom 114 are below the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote in a papal conclave.