Jānis Mendriks
Jānis Mendriks was a Latvian Catholic priest killed in a Soviet Gulag.Biography
Mendriks was born in Logocki, Kalupe Parish, in southern Latgale. He was ordained a priest at St. James's Cathedral, Riga on 3 April 1938. He was a member of the Congregation of Marian Fathers. After his ordination, he served as a vicar at the Marian parish in Viļāni.
In 1942, while he served a parish in Ostron, a German policeman died. He knew the man to be impenitent, and denied him burial in hallowed ground. This refusal required him to hide from German occupation authorities.
After the Soviet re-occupation of Latvia in 1944, he resumed parish work. He was arrested on 25 October 1950 and sent to prison in Riga. On 24 March 1951 he was sentenced to 10 years of forced labor for "organizing anti-Soviet nationalist gangs and for anti-Soviet propaganda." He was deported to the Komi Republic and worked at a coal mine in the Vorkuta Gulag. Mendriks secretly fulfilled his priestly duties in the labour camp.
Inmates at Vorkuta who were forced to work in the region's coal mines went on strike during the Vorkuta uprising in July 1953. The mostly passive strike was put down on 1 August, when troops were ordered to fire at the strikers, resulting in the deaths of at least 42 prisoners, including Mendriks.
Mendriks has been honoured by the Roman Catholic Church as a Servant of God since 2003.
