Janusz Bardach (1919–2002)
Author of Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag
About the Author
Disambiguation Notice:
PLEASE do not erase contents of CK unless they are incorrect.
Works by Janusz Bardach
L'uomo del gulag 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1919-07-28
- Date of death
- 2002-08-16
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Moscow Medical Stomatological Institute (1950)
- Occupations
- tank driver, Red Army
physician
Plastic surgeon
memoirist - Organizations
- University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics
- Relationships
- Bardach, Juliusz (brother)
- Short biography
- According to The New York Times, Dr. Janusz Bardach was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and moved with his family to Poland in 1920. In 1940, during World War II, he had an accident with the Soviet tank he was driving and was sentenced to 10 years hard labor in the Russian gulag. After his release, he studied medicine in Moscow and returned to Poland, heading up an early program in plastic surgery there. He emigrated to the USA in 1972 and the next year became chairman of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. He also held other posts, administrative and teaching, at the university's Medical College before retiring in 1991. He described his prison camp experiences in the memoir Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag (1998), written with Kathleen Gleeson.
- Nationality
- Poland (birth)
USA - Birthplace
- Odessa, Ukrainian People's Republic
- Places of residence
- Wlodzimierz-Wolynski, Poland
Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR, USSR
Kolyma Region, USSR
Moscow, RSFSR, USSR
Lodz, Poland
Iowa City, Iowa, USA - Place of death
- Iowa City, Iowa, USA
- Burial location
- Agudas Achim Cemetery, Iowa City, Johnson County, Iowa, USA
- Map Location
- Ukraine
- Disambiguation notice
- PLEASE do not erase contents of CK unless they are incorrect.
Members
Reviews
In 1941, accidentally rolling a Soviet tank while fording a river was considered a capital offence by the Red Army. Unfortunately for young Janusz Bardach, he committed just such an error; luckily for him an old acquaintance from his hometown in Poland had enough rank and influence to commute the court-martial penalty from death to 10 years hard labour in Siberia. For the next four years, Bardach endured hellish conditions in various labour camps--first a logging camp, then a gold mine in show more the frozen north. Frigid temperatures, inadequate food and clothing combined with physical and spiritual malaise to bring prisoners first to the edge of despair and then to the brink of suicide. Bardach survived by turning his mind off, by refusing to remember happier times or to anticipate the future. He became, simply, a beast of burden, shuffling through the hours of his slavery until he could fall into the brief oblivion of sleep.
Ironically, it was a near brush with death that proved to be Bardach's salvation. After surviving an explosion, he was sent to a prison hospital where he managed to talk his way into a job as a medical assistant. There he gained both a new lease on life and a future profession. Released from his sentence early, in 1945, Bardach went on to become a surgeon. His memoir, Man Is Wolf to Man, is more than just an account of his sufferings in a Russian labour camp; it is also a meditation on the will to survive in the face of hopelessness, the occasional kindnesses of strangers in unexpected places, and above all, the struggle to remain human under the most inhumane conditions.
A record of survival in the Kolyma prison camp in Siberia, written by a Jewish Pole and Communist sympathiser, who was sentenced to ten years hard labour for a minor infraction. Bardach exposes not only the human suffering of the camps, but the paranoia and corruption of Stalin's regime. show less
Ironically, it was a near brush with death that proved to be Bardach's salvation. After surviving an explosion, he was sent to a prison hospital where he managed to talk his way into a job as a medical assistant. There he gained both a new lease on life and a future profession. Released from his sentence early, in 1945, Bardach went on to become a surgeon. His memoir, Man Is Wolf to Man, is more than just an account of his sufferings in a Russian labour camp; it is also a meditation on the will to survive in the face of hopelessness, the occasional kindnesses of strangers in unexpected places, and above all, the struggle to remain human under the most inhumane conditions.
A record of survival in the Kolyma prison camp in Siberia, written by a Jewish Pole and Communist sympathiser, who was sentenced to ten years hard labour for a minor infraction. Bardach exposes not only the human suffering of the camps, but the paranoia and corruption of Stalin's regime. show less
This is a story of a young Polish man's odyssey through the work camps of the Soviet Union, including the dreaded Kolyma in Siberia, during WWII. He survived, obviously, and is now a well-respected plastic and reconstructive surgeon in the USA. Bardach was a Polish Jew, living in eastern Poland in the area taken over by the USSR under the Molotov-RIbbentrop Pact. Life under the Soviets, and in particular the NKVD, was bad enough but the townspeople settled into an uneasy pattern of show more existence. This was thrown to the winds with the German invasion of the USSR.
Bardach spoke Russian well as he was born in Odessa and his family still had a number of relatives there. He wasn't keen on joining the Red Army, but he did so, prior to the German invasion, and was sent to tank school in Russia. With the invasion of the USSR, his tank regiment was moving forward to the front lines when the tank he was driving turned over in a river as he was exploring a ford. He was arrested and convicted in a field court-martial of trying to sabotage the Soviet war effort and harbouring intentions of returning to this home town to assist the Nazis (this made up by the soldier left with him for a couple of days while they waited for help to pull the tank out of the water). He was sentenced to death, and then had the first of major interventions of fate, or luck, that kept him alive: the ranking NKVD officer was a Jew from Odessa who had lived on the same street as Bardach's relatives, and he commuted the sentence to 10 years hard labour.
Then followed a mind-numbing trip across the USSR from transit camp to transit camp, from prison to prison, in cattle cars, until he finally reached Kolyma. Along the way, Bardach escaped from the train, but was captured and viciously beaten for hours by the guards as an example to others who might think of escape. Perhaps his second stroke of fate/luck was that the commander of the train didn't want to be bothered with the paperwork involved if one of his prisoners died in transit. He didn't care what shape Bardach was in on delivery, but he wanted him alive. This slender thread saved Bardach's life.
The final stage of the trip to Kolyma was by ship with prisoners stuffed into the holds for a five day trip that the word nightmare does not begin to describe, particularly when one group of prisoners discovered that there were women prisoners on board. They broke through a wooden partition separating the two and went on a orgy of rape and murder. One could comment on the beastly nature of man, but I think that is giving animals a bad name: man is much worse because he has the capacity to think, and plan, no matter how limited or screwed-up his intelligence. As I read once:
Nothing in nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature....Cruelty is the result of talking oneself into the infliction of pain or into the conscious ignoring of pain already inflicted. The cuckoo doesn't talk itself into anything. Nor does the wolf.
In Kolyma, Bardach was set to work clearing forests and then in the mines in incredibly harsh and difficult circumstances. Then came the next stroke of luck/fate: while being transferred to an even more horrendous mine, the truck he was on had a accident, tumbled down a steep incline and burned: all on board except Bardach and one other person were killed. When he was taken to the hospital, he pleaded with people he met there and got taken on as a feldsher, a medical assistant, although he lied totally in saying that he had had three years of medical school in university. This was his salvation. Life was not easy, especially when he contracted TB and thought that he would die, but it was infinitely better than the mines or the forests. Bardach was finally released after the war, thanks to the efforts of his brother, a high-ranking officer in the Polish army working in the embassy in Moscow.
The book is well-written. It is a story of unbelievable hardship and depravity with flashes of compassion and feeling and sympathy. It is also a testament to the strength of the human will and what some people can survive. As a description of the senselessness, lawlessness and brutality that was the Soviet regime, it is a microcosm of the dismay, confusion, despair, incredible hardships, brutal deaths, and loss of hope that was multiplied by millions of people across the Soviet and Nazi regimes.
Bardach started out with the belief that the Soviet Union was the workers' paradise and that it would welcome with open arms refugees, including Jews, from the Nazis. He was soon disabused of this, but hung on for a while to the other myth that Stalin was a great leader and if only he knew of the unlawful arrests and persecutions, he would put an end to them. It speaks to the power of the image of the Soviet Union and the effectiveness of its propaganda as a country run by and dedicated to the workers, but as another writer has said:
...these theories which drift across the sky become ridiculous, blind, ignoble, bloody, vain. Gentle ideas are pregnant with mountains of corpses.
There is a Kafkaesque irony to the fact that in the midst of the camps where death was continual through a combination of overwork and malnutrition, or murder by the guards or other prisoners, there were hospitals dedicated to the recovery of patients. But as one doctor said, the limit of his interest in the well-being of his patients was: "I want to get him in better shape and send him back to the mines".
In reflecting on why some people survived the camps and others didn't, Bardach comes to the conclusion that to survive you needed strength and luck. He had the former, but this alone would not be sufficient, and he was very fortunate in the latter. show less
Bardach spoke Russian well as he was born in Odessa and his family still had a number of relatives there. He wasn't keen on joining the Red Army, but he did so, prior to the German invasion, and was sent to tank school in Russia. With the invasion of the USSR, his tank regiment was moving forward to the front lines when the tank he was driving turned over in a river as he was exploring a ford. He was arrested and convicted in a field court-martial of trying to sabotage the Soviet war effort and harbouring intentions of returning to this home town to assist the Nazis (this made up by the soldier left with him for a couple of days while they waited for help to pull the tank out of the water). He was sentenced to death, and then had the first of major interventions of fate, or luck, that kept him alive: the ranking NKVD officer was a Jew from Odessa who had lived on the same street as Bardach's relatives, and he commuted the sentence to 10 years hard labour.
Then followed a mind-numbing trip across the USSR from transit camp to transit camp, from prison to prison, in cattle cars, until he finally reached Kolyma. Along the way, Bardach escaped from the train, but was captured and viciously beaten for hours by the guards as an example to others who might think of escape. Perhaps his second stroke of fate/luck was that the commander of the train didn't want to be bothered with the paperwork involved if one of his prisoners died in transit. He didn't care what shape Bardach was in on delivery, but he wanted him alive. This slender thread saved Bardach's life.
The final stage of the trip to Kolyma was by ship with prisoners stuffed into the holds for a five day trip that the word nightmare does not begin to describe, particularly when one group of prisoners discovered that there were women prisoners on board. They broke through a wooden partition separating the two and went on a orgy of rape and murder. One could comment on the beastly nature of man, but I think that is giving animals a bad name: man is much worse because he has the capacity to think, and plan, no matter how limited or screwed-up his intelligence. As I read once:
Nothing in nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature....Cruelty is the result of talking oneself into the infliction of pain or into the conscious ignoring of pain already inflicted. The cuckoo doesn't talk itself into anything. Nor does the wolf.
In Kolyma, Bardach was set to work clearing forests and then in the mines in incredibly harsh and difficult circumstances. Then came the next stroke of luck/fate: while being transferred to an even more horrendous mine, the truck he was on had a accident, tumbled down a steep incline and burned: all on board except Bardach and one other person were killed. When he was taken to the hospital, he pleaded with people he met there and got taken on as a feldsher, a medical assistant, although he lied totally in saying that he had had three years of medical school in university. This was his salvation. Life was not easy, especially when he contracted TB and thought that he would die, but it was infinitely better than the mines or the forests. Bardach was finally released after the war, thanks to the efforts of his brother, a high-ranking officer in the Polish army working in the embassy in Moscow.
The book is well-written. It is a story of unbelievable hardship and depravity with flashes of compassion and feeling and sympathy. It is also a testament to the strength of the human will and what some people can survive. As a description of the senselessness, lawlessness and brutality that was the Soviet regime, it is a microcosm of the dismay, confusion, despair, incredible hardships, brutal deaths, and loss of hope that was multiplied by millions of people across the Soviet and Nazi regimes.
Bardach started out with the belief that the Soviet Union was the workers' paradise and that it would welcome with open arms refugees, including Jews, from the Nazis. He was soon disabused of this, but hung on for a while to the other myth that Stalin was a great leader and if only he knew of the unlawful arrests and persecutions, he would put an end to them. It speaks to the power of the image of the Soviet Union and the effectiveness of its propaganda as a country run by and dedicated to the workers, but as another writer has said:
...these theories which drift across the sky become ridiculous, blind, ignoble, bloody, vain. Gentle ideas are pregnant with mountains of corpses.
There is a Kafkaesque irony to the fact that in the midst of the camps where death was continual through a combination of overwork and malnutrition, or murder by the guards or other prisoners, there were hospitals dedicated to the recovery of patients. But as one doctor said, the limit of his interest in the well-being of his patients was: "I want to get him in better shape and send him back to the mines".
In reflecting on why some people survived the camps and others didn't, Bardach comes to the conclusion that to survive you needed strength and luck. He had the former, but this alone would not be sufficient, and he was very fortunate in the latter. show less
I really liked this memoir of the gulag, but found myself projecting survivor's guilt-- how did this guy survive such awfulness intact with all the suffering going on around him? I struggled with being angry with him for being so lucky and feeling guilty for that feeling. Weird.
A harrowing story of a young man's flight from his native Poland, induction in the Red Army, and years of survival in the Soviet prison camps throughout World War Two. It is a marvel that Bardach was able to survive at all much less provide introspection of the human capacity to endure punishment, harsh environments, and each other. The book did not provide as much historical context as I was hoping for, however truly provided an indepth look at one man's attempt to endure. Bardach offers a show more sensitive description of his fellow prisoners, captors, and his experience through the Soviet Prison system. While many times wondering if his fate could become any worse, the next page proved in fact it could, which makes the book an intense read, I find Man is Wolf to Man very worthwhile and enjoyable. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 6
- Members
- 307
- Popularity
- #76,699
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 6
- ISBNs
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