The Russian military machinery is traditionally reliant on rail supply. However, in the case of the current invasion of Ukraine, it is struggling to control key railway nodes, causing logistical issues for the occupiers and hindering their progress into the interior.
Josef Kalinowski, later barefoot Carmelite, Saint Rafael of St. Joseph, was involved in the design of one of the first Ukrainian routes, Kursk-Kyiv-Odesa.
Josef was born in 1835 into a Polish family, but in Russian-occupied Vilnius. As a child, he witnessed the aftermath of the recent anti-Russian uprising: constant deportations and executions in the marketplace, but also "a procession of Jewish children being sent into exile." For a gifted young man, there was no other path to education than to study at one of the Russian schools (Polish ones were closed), thus collaborating on his own downfall. With great doubts, he completed the engineering academy in St. Petersburg (which also inevitably involved the rank of lieutenant in the Tsar's army) and was assigned to design the aforementioned railway.
In 1863, another anti-Russian uprising broke out. In Josef's "Memoirs," we read:
"The idea of unarmed people fighting against Russian dominance possessing a huge and powerful army was all too clear. To retain a uniform of the Tsar's army when the heart trembles with fear of receiving an order to shed brotherly blood became unacceptable. I asked myself: Am I allowed to remain idle while so many sacrifice everything for this cause?"
Twenty-eight-year-old Josef – under the pretext of poor health – promptly requested release from the Russian army, joined the uprising, and became the Minister of National Defense in Lithuania. This uprising was also brutally suppressed, and Josef was sentenced to death. However, the Tsarist regime rightly feared that the death of the Pole and Catholic Kalinowski could be perceived among the subjugated nations as a martyr's death. Therefore, the military tribunal ultimately reduced his sentence to ten years of forced labor in eastern Siberia…
"On the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul around noon, a long line of us prisoners set out through the streets of Vilnius to the train station. A huge crowd gathered in the streets, and Cossacks on horseback pushed away anyone who tried to approach us. Many people leaned out of windows. The whole situation looked like a funeral procession. And how many such processions had passed before us since the beginning of the uprising! Among us were people of various statuses and ages: homeowners, doctors, artists, workers, peasants, married women, and young girls… It looked like a flood driving its waters to the Far East. No priest accompanied us. We boarded the carriages, where we were crammed together. The guards treated us as objects that they could handle entirely at their discretion. As the train departed, the long crowns of the trees lining the track moved and showered the carriages with their blossoms like tombs with the dead. … The endless plains beyond the Urals became a cemetery without borders for tens of thousands of victims torn from the embrace of their motherland, and forever swallowed.”
Saint Rafael, pray for us!
(Rafael Kalinowski /1835–1907/, processed according to the book by A. M. Sicari Saints of Carmel,
quotes are taken from the saint's "Memoirs")
