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Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag
FROM THE BOOK :"The pit I was ordered to dig had the precise dimensions of a casket. The NKVD officer carefully designed it. He measured my size with a stick, made lines on the forest floor, and told me to dig. He wanted to make sure I'd fit well inside."
In 1941 Janusz Bardach's death sentence was commuted to ten years' hard labor and he was sent to Kolyma―the harshest, coldest, and most deadly prison in Joseph Stalin's labor camp system―the Siberia of Siberias. The only English-language memoir since the fall of communism to chronicle the atrocities committed during the Stalinist regime, Bardach's gripping testimony explores the darkest corners of the human condition at the same time that it documents the tyranny of Stalin's reign, equal only to that of Hitler. With breathtaking immediacy, a riveting eye for detail, and a humanity that permeates the events and landscapes he describes, Bardach recounts the extraordinary story of this nearly inconceivable world.
The story begins with the Nazi occupation when Bardach, a young Polish Jew inspired by Soviet Communism, crosses the border of Poland to join the ranks of the Red Army. His ideals are quickly shattered when he is arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to death. How Bardach survives an endless barrage of brutality―from a near-fatal beating to the harsh conditions and slow starvation of the gulag existence―is a testament to human endurance under the most oppressive circumstances. Besides being of great historical significance, Bardach's narrative is a celebration of life and a vital affirmation of what it means to be human.
In 1941 Janusz Bardach's death sentence was commuted to ten years' hard labor and he was sent to Kolyma―the harshest, coldest, and most deadly prison in Joseph Stalin's labor camp system―the Siberia of Siberias. The only English-language memoir since the fall of communism to chronicle the atrocities committed during the Stalinist regime, Bardach's gripping testimony explores the darkest corners of the human condition at the same time that it documents the tyranny of Stalin's reign, equal only to that of Hitler. With breathtaking immediacy, a riveting eye for detail, and a humanity that permeates the events and landscapes he describes, Bardach recounts the extraordinary story of this nearly inconceivable world.
The story begins with the Nazi occupation when Bardach, a young Polish Jew inspired by Soviet Communism, crosses the border of Poland to join the ranks of the Red Army. His ideals are quickly shattered when he is arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to death. How Bardach survives an endless barrage of brutality―from a near-fatal beating to the harsh conditions and slow starvation of the gulag existence―is a testament to human endurance under the most oppressive circumstances. Besides being of great historical significance, Bardach's narrative is a celebration of life and a vital affirmation of what it means to be human.
440 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
Janusz Bardach
9 books9 followersJanusz Barach was born in Odessa to Polish Jews Ottylia and Mark Bardach. At the age of one, his father Mark moved the family back to Wlodzimierz-Wolynski, Poland (now Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Ukraine). Mark Bardach was a dentist, and his uncle, Jakov Julievich Bardach, was a doctor. Janusz grew up in Poland as a secular Jew and inherited from his mother a strong support of the Soviet Union. As a teenager, he suffered from anti-Semitic attacks and joined Jewish and left-wing groups.
When, during World War II Poland was partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, Bardach was drafted into the Red Army. He became a tank driver. Sarcastic political remarks in training and an accident during a scouting mission that resulted in an overturned tank caused him to be court-martialed for counter-revolutionary activity. He was condemned to execution, but the sentence was commuted to hard labor in the gulag.
While in the transit camps leading to the gold mines, Bardach experienced anti-Semitism from fellow Polish inmates. In order to escape the Polish sector he faked stomach cramps and went to the camp doctor. The doctor was impressed that Bardach already knew the diagnosis and treatment from his feigned symptoms, and asked Bardach if he was a medical student. Bardach lied and claimed to be one, drawing on medical knowledge gleaned from his father, and was made a feldsher, or doctor's assistant, in the camps.
Later, Bardach was sent to the infamous gold mines at Kolyma. While being transferred, his truck's furnace[clarification needed] exploded, killing the driver, guards, and many prisoners. Using this incident and his previous record as a doctor's assistant, Bardach talked his way into working in the camp hospitals, where he continued to pretend to be a medical student. After the war, Bardach's sentence was commuted, and he moved to Moscow to attend medical school.
Medical career
In 1950 Bardach graduated from the Moscow Medical Stomatologogical Institute, and completed his residency there as well in 1954, specializing in reconstructive maxillofacial surgery. After residency and marriage, he returned to Poland, moving to Lodz, where worked on procedures for cleft lips and palates. Eventually, he developed the procedure known as the Bardach palatoplasty.
Anti-Semitism and Communism drove him to escape Poland, and in 1972 he joined the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Iowa and later became chairman of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery of the Head and Neck. During those years he could not speak freely about his experiences during the war nor return to Poland, as both could cause the arrest of his family members remaining in Poland. After the fall of Communism he wrote his two memoires, listed below.
When, during World War II Poland was partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, Bardach was drafted into the Red Army. He became a tank driver. Sarcastic political remarks in training and an accident during a scouting mission that resulted in an overturned tank caused him to be court-martialed for counter-revolutionary activity. He was condemned to execution, but the sentence was commuted to hard labor in the gulag.
While in the transit camps leading to the gold mines, Bardach experienced anti-Semitism from fellow Polish inmates. In order to escape the Polish sector he faked stomach cramps and went to the camp doctor. The doctor was impressed that Bardach already knew the diagnosis and treatment from his feigned symptoms, and asked Bardach if he was a medical student. Bardach lied and claimed to be one, drawing on medical knowledge gleaned from his father, and was made a feldsher, or doctor's assistant, in the camps.
Later, Bardach was sent to the infamous gold mines at Kolyma. While being transferred, his truck's furnace[clarification needed] exploded, killing the driver, guards, and many prisoners. Using this incident and his previous record as a doctor's assistant, Bardach talked his way into working in the camp hospitals, where he continued to pretend to be a medical student. After the war, Bardach's sentence was commuted, and he moved to Moscow to attend medical school.
Medical career
In 1950 Bardach graduated from the Moscow Medical Stomatologogical Institute, and completed his residency there as well in 1954, specializing in reconstructive maxillofacial surgery. After residency and marriage, he returned to Poland, moving to Lodz, where worked on procedures for cleft lips and palates. Eventually, he developed the procedure known as the Bardach palatoplasty.
Anti-Semitism and Communism drove him to escape Poland, and in 1972 he joined the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Iowa and later became chairman of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery of the Head and Neck. During those years he could not speak freely about his experiences during the war nor return to Poland, as both could cause the arrest of his family members remaining in Poland. After the fall of Communism he wrote his two memoires, listed below.
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August 12, 2011
Homo homini lupus. Man is wolf to man. It would have been more appropriate to leave that as the title without the "Surviving the Gulag" part. Janusz Bardach survived, all right. This is a memoir. Memoirs can be self serving, deluded and one sided and I was still surprised to read one that overwhelmingly was all of those things. Like how Janusz Bardach was shocked to be court martialled when fellow soviet soldier blamed him for their tank sinking (despite being ordered to inform on the two fellow poles in his regiment he was shocked the same happened to him. He actually told another soldier he wanted to flee! AFTER another soldier told him he was asked to inform on him and to say nothing to anyone!). I thought this was going to be an inside look at one man's experience in one of the worst periods of the gulag. It's a memoir! I should have known. Man will do anything to other men to get ahead. The point is getting ahead of other men, rather than survival, it seems. In the case of this memoir, getting ahead is writing a memoir about how much better you were than those who were more helpless than you were.
You can learn a lot by how one sees themselves, though, and by what they gloss over (such as witnessing and doing nothing about rapes). It was interesting that Bardach believed that he was superior to others because he was able to pretend he wasn't in prison at all. His siding with the criminals and what read like a version of stockholm's syndrome if it were from the ugly girl in a Mean Girls group justifying putting bleach in the unpopular girl's drink. But they were nice to me! They can't be all bad. (They ran the show and tortured the other inmates. He was lucky enough to count some as friends. It could have as easily gone the other way. Sometimes former guards turned inmates still ran the show, with the help of their still guards buddies). Self interest up the ass (did that happen to Janusz? I don't know because he's not the memoirist who would ever admit to it). However, it was really hard to take so much of that holier than thou shit when what I wanted to know about what motivated the former soldiers who still loudly proclaimed their allegiance to Stalin. Man is wolf stuff of everyone involved, not just Janusz Bardach lies to live with himself (it's not all that compelling to read that when it's told so smugly). How did all of those people who did what they were told feel about being in there, anyway (they were still playing the game)? Life CLEARLY sucked all kinds of putrid cock yet there's this guy talking about how important it is to survive. For what?!! Man is Wolf to Man is the true title. People stepped on one another to live another day. That was the only reason. Janusz Bardach was no exception, whatever his memoir says about hope springs eternal, it's important to stay happy blah blah blah. The horrors inflicted on man had fuck all to do with who was strong enough to stay happy (read: deluded as hell).
Janusz, you were not better than the dokhodyaga. You weren't. I wanted to reach into the book and slap his face every fucking time an allusion to superiority to these tragic souls was mentioned. What is this? A toot your own horn memoir? You had criminal friends (the urka) to fudge your work load during the short stint you were anywhere near the mines (loading the conveyor belt). That meant you didn't get a smaller and smaller food ration (which was hopelessly little as it was. Not close to the required amount for hard labor). Of course they ate rats, corpses and chewed debris and leaves to provide the illusion of eating. Of course they lost hope and their minds! They had to work in the godamned gold mines and starve to death. You didn't! You had a cushy hospital job because you had friends to go along with your ruse of being a medical student before your arrest. I'm not saying that's not exactly what you should have done but it doesn't make you BETTER because you were lucky enough those doctors weren't the kind of doctors who would report you. They would have been sent to the mines too if caught. Not that it was just him. According to this memoir, many looked down on the dying. It says a lot about them that it was the dying they looked down on. Not the guards, not the criminals, not the rapists, not Stalin. The dying.
Janusz, you injected mental patients with camphor oil to induce traumatic seizures. They would not fucking thank you for this. They wouldn't. They wouldn't thank you for the shock treatments. That is stepping on other people to get ahead! It is! It is, it is, it is. The patients you signed papers that they were faking their mental illnesses were sent back to the mines. The ones who had seizures (the ones you induced. Remember? How was that not totally fucking evil?) were given lobotomies. Yeah, they were sooooo grateful you smiled at them. You were doing good work there. Uh huh.
Shit, I forgot. It was only shocking when men did cruel things to each other if it was because you were Jewish. The one asshole when you worked on the conveyor belt was the worst thing to have happened in the entire system of gulags. None of the other jerks mattered, just that one anti-semite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Millions perished in prison and in the mines. Or were executed (lucky your family friend was an officer to commute your sentence to the gulag, eh? You would have been shot in the head. Survival is who you know). There were examples of what people would do to each other to live another day all around him yet the only time it seemed to rile his anger was if the person might have hated Jews. A lot of people did and do. They hate a lot of other people too. Men and women were in the gulag for no reason. Yesterday's guards were today's inmates. I don't buy it that men only did horrible things to each other if one of them were Jewish and the rest of the time it was shit happens. Tell that to the thousands of Prussian women who were sent to the gulag for reparations after the war. Americans, Lithuanians, Poles, children of "suspected" officers. Any name they could think of, pretty much. "Let's arrest everyone named Misha today." They didn't need reasons. It isn't reasoned! I think it said more about Janusz that he only cared if they hated Jews. Sorta missing the man is wolf thing? What was the point about writing what men are willing to do to survive if you only care about who hates Jews? He wasn't religious. He was more bothered about the dislike from other people for coming from a Jewish family than he felt about the religion itself (he only believes in God if it is to say god spared him. Other times he confesses he has no faith). Why couldn't he have said more about this? That was important, I thought. It belied his hope he claimed to have always had. Okay, survival for what? Do you even know? Faith is belief in the future, right? Memoirs are after the fact...
By the way, it was a Jewish man who "invented" the many techniques they used in the gulag, such as the sick food rations system versus how much shock work you can force yourself to do. Not to mention killing them off after three months because that's how long emaciated living corpses can keep up that kind of manual labor. Then you just arrest more people! If you were last in line you were shot. Being in line meant someone else died. What did that have to do with who was Jewish or not? It just means that the human race is fucked. It meant more that there were doctors willing to risk their own lives to help out a Janusz than it did the rest of it. Better to investigate that than pretending everything is okay for the sake of pretend.
Janusz, you didn't do anything when your family friend's garderner's wife was gang raped right in front of you (you worried if you had to deport the respected Jewish community guy who never liked you). Or the other women in the gulag. You kinda glossed over the rapes, didn't you? Hell, you hounded the nurse Zina to proclaim undying love to you so the illusion of romance could make you feel free (she would dump you when you started gloating about your Polish army officer brother getting you out five years early, the same thing her last boyfriend did). She needed a boyfriend so she only had to fuck one man instead of many. In the same paragraph you would write about how much you loved your wife (she was killed in the ghetto he discovered some time after release). Oh you feel so guilty maybe having to choose between the two women. It was such a relief not to have to choose!
Janusz, happiness had fuck all to do with it. You don't go hungry you live another day. If you ever had to work in the mines you would have been hungrier than you already were. Your body would have disintegrated. Instead you got to eat bread rolls with raisins, oatmeal, drink, bacon, give your criminal buddies drugs from the hospital, have parties and get special favors from doctors. You pretended you weren't even in jail. That's the survival. The pretending and the getting breaks so that the other person has to to go etap instead of you. One's survival means that someone else goes to the mines. It means someone else is made an example of and beaten for confessions and more names.
I needed to know why I had been spared, why I survived, why I deserved better than everyone who was killed or died by their own hand."
That's my problem with this book. Did he truly write this memoir for some kind of reversal of survivor's guilt? Sometimes it seemed like he was doing just that. I suspect it had a lot to do with fleeing to Russia while his family stayed behind to get killed by Nazis (hence the inflated sense of Jewish persecution instead of the very real Soviet persecution). Was he really so deluded as to think that the will to be happy was all one needed to survive and all of those other things (torturing the patients in the psych ward, for one) had nothing to do with it? That he was better than the one's who couldn't do the same?
That slaughtering reindeer for their blood (my mind has already forgotten why this had medical uses) and selling of it on the black market enabled him to survive (and make more money than he ever dreamed of) when he was released (and guess who did the work? That's right, prison inmates! That was pretty disgusting to get rich off their labour).
In the immortal words of Bruce McCulloch in the Kids in the Hall film Brain Candy: Fuck happy. Man is wolf.
Bardach wrote another book about his life after the Gulag. I know that he became a plastic surgeon (hair lips and stuff like that. Not Nip Tuck kinda plastic surgeon) and eventually moved to the USA (he died in 2002). For years, though, he lived in Russia. His brother, a lawyer, remained in Poland (their parents were shot by Nazis). The plot summary for the memoir that I read said he fought depression and finding a life in society. I don't know if I believe that after having read hundreds of pages of what has to be memoirist bullshit about hope and happiness. It was sad when he is reunited with his brother (with a new young wife. The old was also killed in the ghettos) and they make him stay in the guest house because they don't trust the man he has become in the gulag. A rare insight into his reality...
Seriously, what was the point of this let's blame the victims memoir?
Also, he was just as indoctrinated into communist lore as the soviets. His Russian mama raised him on it and he was as eager to join as they were (although they both enjoyed dentist daddy's wealthy lifestyle). Did that stop Bardach from looking down on others? (If you've read this review you know it didn't.) Man, I hate memoirs! Why did I expect any different? That's the reason most would write a memoir at all, isn't it?
Tips to survive the gulag:
1. Memorize a Russian baby's name book. Then you have lots of people to name in your confessions if they drag you back in for more beatings.
2. If you're a woman you had better find a big guy. If you aren't Russian you'll be the soldier's bitch and there's no hope for you.
3. Grow up speaking Russian, as Janusz did (he was born in Odessa).
4. Develop dog whispering skills. That way if you can escape you can sweet talk to the German Shepherds and they won't alert the guards.
5. Don't claim to be Lenin or Stalin if you fake insanity. Those are dead giveaways.
6. The goddess of worker's comp does not exist in the gulag. Chopping off your fingers or a leg just means a longer sentence.
7. Get a tattoo like in Eastern Promises. Or, get a tattoo of Stalin on the back of your shaved scalp because they aren't allowed to deface pictures of the leader.
8. Never, ever make a joke. Russians don't have a sense of humor, apparently. For instance, this guy. He's not funny! The audience isn't laughing not even once.
9. People will do ANYTHING for a potato. Wait a second! That's from Empire of the Sun!
10. Criminals can't read and they really love The Count of Monte Cristo. If you can tell them this story they'll befriend you and help you out.
You can learn a lot by how one sees themselves, though, and by what they gloss over (such as witnessing and doing nothing about rapes). It was interesting that Bardach believed that he was superior to others because he was able to pretend he wasn't in prison at all. His siding with the criminals and what read like a version of stockholm's syndrome if it were from the ugly girl in a Mean Girls group justifying putting bleach in the unpopular girl's drink. But they were nice to me! They can't be all bad. (They ran the show and tortured the other inmates. He was lucky enough to count some as friends. It could have as easily gone the other way. Sometimes former guards turned inmates still ran the show, with the help of their still guards buddies). Self interest up the ass (did that happen to Janusz? I don't know because he's not the memoirist who would ever admit to it). However, it was really hard to take so much of that holier than thou shit when what I wanted to know about what motivated the former soldiers who still loudly proclaimed their allegiance to Stalin. Man is wolf stuff of everyone involved, not just Janusz Bardach lies to live with himself (it's not all that compelling to read that when it's told so smugly). How did all of those people who did what they were told feel about being in there, anyway (they were still playing the game)? Life CLEARLY sucked all kinds of putrid cock yet there's this guy talking about how important it is to survive. For what?!! Man is Wolf to Man is the true title. People stepped on one another to live another day. That was the only reason. Janusz Bardach was no exception, whatever his memoir says about hope springs eternal, it's important to stay happy blah blah blah. The horrors inflicted on man had fuck all to do with who was strong enough to stay happy (read: deluded as hell).
Janusz, you were not better than the dokhodyaga. You weren't. I wanted to reach into the book and slap his face every fucking time an allusion to superiority to these tragic souls was mentioned. What is this? A toot your own horn memoir? You had criminal friends (the urka) to fudge your work load during the short stint you were anywhere near the mines (loading the conveyor belt). That meant you didn't get a smaller and smaller food ration (which was hopelessly little as it was. Not close to the required amount for hard labor). Of course they ate rats, corpses and chewed debris and leaves to provide the illusion of eating. Of course they lost hope and their minds! They had to work in the godamned gold mines and starve to death. You didn't! You had a cushy hospital job because you had friends to go along with your ruse of being a medical student before your arrest. I'm not saying that's not exactly what you should have done but it doesn't make you BETTER because you were lucky enough those doctors weren't the kind of doctors who would report you. They would have been sent to the mines too if caught. Not that it was just him. According to this memoir, many looked down on the dying. It says a lot about them that it was the dying they looked down on. Not the guards, not the criminals, not the rapists, not Stalin. The dying.
Janusz, you injected mental patients with camphor oil to induce traumatic seizures. They would not fucking thank you for this. They wouldn't. They wouldn't thank you for the shock treatments. That is stepping on other people to get ahead! It is! It is, it is, it is. The patients you signed papers that they were faking their mental illnesses were sent back to the mines. The ones who had seizures (the ones you induced. Remember? How was that not totally fucking evil?) were given lobotomies. Yeah, they were sooooo grateful you smiled at them. You were doing good work there. Uh huh.
Shit, I forgot. It was only shocking when men did cruel things to each other if it was because you were Jewish. The one asshole when you worked on the conveyor belt was the worst thing to have happened in the entire system of gulags. None of the other jerks mattered, just that one anti-semite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Millions perished in prison and in the mines. Or were executed (lucky your family friend was an officer to commute your sentence to the gulag, eh? You would have been shot in the head. Survival is who you know). There were examples of what people would do to each other to live another day all around him yet the only time it seemed to rile his anger was if the person might have hated Jews. A lot of people did and do. They hate a lot of other people too. Men and women were in the gulag for no reason. Yesterday's guards were today's inmates. I don't buy it that men only did horrible things to each other if one of them were Jewish and the rest of the time it was shit happens. Tell that to the thousands of Prussian women who were sent to the gulag for reparations after the war. Americans, Lithuanians, Poles, children of "suspected" officers. Any name they could think of, pretty much. "Let's arrest everyone named Misha today." They didn't need reasons. It isn't reasoned! I think it said more about Janusz that he only cared if they hated Jews. Sorta missing the man is wolf thing? What was the point about writing what men are willing to do to survive if you only care about who hates Jews? He wasn't religious. He was more bothered about the dislike from other people for coming from a Jewish family than he felt about the religion itself (he only believes in God if it is to say god spared him. Other times he confesses he has no faith). Why couldn't he have said more about this? That was important, I thought. It belied his hope he claimed to have always had. Okay, survival for what? Do you even know? Faith is belief in the future, right? Memoirs are after the fact...
By the way, it was a Jewish man who "invented" the many techniques they used in the gulag, such as the sick food rations system versus how much shock work you can force yourself to do. Not to mention killing them off after three months because that's how long emaciated living corpses can keep up that kind of manual labor. Then you just arrest more people! If you were last in line you were shot. Being in line meant someone else died. What did that have to do with who was Jewish or not? It just means that the human race is fucked. It meant more that there were doctors willing to risk their own lives to help out a Janusz than it did the rest of it. Better to investigate that than pretending everything is okay for the sake of pretend.
Janusz, you didn't do anything when your family friend's garderner's wife was gang raped right in front of you (you worried if you had to deport the respected Jewish community guy who never liked you). Or the other women in the gulag. You kinda glossed over the rapes, didn't you? Hell, you hounded the nurse Zina to proclaim undying love to you so the illusion of romance could make you feel free (she would dump you when you started gloating about your Polish army officer brother getting you out five years early, the same thing her last boyfriend did). She needed a boyfriend so she only had to fuck one man instead of many. In the same paragraph you would write about how much you loved your wife (she was killed in the ghetto he discovered some time after release). Oh you feel so guilty maybe having to choose between the two women. It was such a relief not to have to choose!
Janusz, happiness had fuck all to do with it. You don't go hungry you live another day. If you ever had to work in the mines you would have been hungrier than you already were. Your body would have disintegrated. Instead you got to eat bread rolls with raisins, oatmeal, drink, bacon, give your criminal buddies drugs from the hospital, have parties and get special favors from doctors. You pretended you weren't even in jail. That's the survival. The pretending and the getting breaks so that the other person has to to go etap instead of you. One's survival means that someone else goes to the mines. It means someone else is made an example of and beaten for confessions and more names.
I needed to know why I had been spared, why I survived, why I deserved better than everyone who was killed or died by their own hand."
That's my problem with this book. Did he truly write this memoir for some kind of reversal of survivor's guilt? Sometimes it seemed like he was doing just that. I suspect it had a lot to do with fleeing to Russia while his family stayed behind to get killed by Nazis (hence the inflated sense of Jewish persecution instead of the very real Soviet persecution). Was he really so deluded as to think that the will to be happy was all one needed to survive and all of those other things (torturing the patients in the psych ward, for one) had nothing to do with it? That he was better than the one's who couldn't do the same?
That slaughtering reindeer for their blood (my mind has already forgotten why this had medical uses) and selling of it on the black market enabled him to survive (and make more money than he ever dreamed of) when he was released (and guess who did the work? That's right, prison inmates! That was pretty disgusting to get rich off their labour).
In the immortal words of Bruce McCulloch in the Kids in the Hall film Brain Candy: Fuck happy. Man is wolf.
Bardach wrote another book about his life after the Gulag. I know that he became a plastic surgeon (hair lips and stuff like that. Not Nip Tuck kinda plastic surgeon) and eventually moved to the USA (he died in 2002). For years, though, he lived in Russia. His brother, a lawyer, remained in Poland (their parents were shot by Nazis). The plot summary for the memoir that I read said he fought depression and finding a life in society. I don't know if I believe that after having read hundreds of pages of what has to be memoirist bullshit about hope and happiness. It was sad when he is reunited with his brother (with a new young wife. The old was also killed in the ghettos) and they make him stay in the guest house because they don't trust the man he has become in the gulag. A rare insight into his reality...
Seriously, what was the point of this let's blame the victims memoir?
Also, he was just as indoctrinated into communist lore as the soviets. His Russian mama raised him on it and he was as eager to join as they were (although they both enjoyed dentist daddy's wealthy lifestyle). Did that stop Bardach from looking down on others? (If you've read this review you know it didn't.) Man, I hate memoirs! Why did I expect any different? That's the reason most would write a memoir at all, isn't it?
Tips to survive the gulag:
1. Memorize a Russian baby's name book. Then you have lots of people to name in your confessions if they drag you back in for more beatings.
2. If you're a woman you had better find a big guy. If you aren't Russian you'll be the soldier's bitch and there's no hope for you.
3. Grow up speaking Russian, as Janusz did (he was born in Odessa).
4. Develop dog whispering skills. That way if you can escape you can sweet talk to the German Shepherds and they won't alert the guards.
5. Don't claim to be Lenin or Stalin if you fake insanity. Those are dead giveaways.
6. The goddess of worker's comp does not exist in the gulag. Chopping off your fingers or a leg just means a longer sentence.
7. Get a tattoo like in Eastern Promises. Or, get a tattoo of Stalin on the back of your shaved scalp because they aren't allowed to deface pictures of the leader.
8. Never, ever make a joke. Russians don't have a sense of humor, apparently. For instance, this guy. He's not funny! The audience isn't laughing not even once.
9. People will do ANYTHING for a potato. Wait a second! That's from Empire of the Sun!
10. Criminals can't read and they really love The Count of Monte Cristo. If you can tell them this story they'll befriend you and help you out.
August 5, 2024
Un libro forte ambientato durante la seconda guerra mondiale, che tratta la storia di un prigioniero di guerra condannato ai lavori forzati nel Gulag, nella rigida Siberia. Il protagonista racconta la sua vita di stenti nei campi di concentramento russi, meno conosciuti rispetto a quelli europei ma altrettanto devastanti. È un libro che apre la mente su quella parte di storia talmente terribile che non deve mai più essere dimenticata.
February 4, 2014
I've read 4 other books written by people who were in the gulag,
this is by far the worst,
in fact the only bad one.
There are no notes or other sources,
the author is the only source.
And he is recounting events that happened 50-60 years earlier.
He is the biggest liar I've ever seen.
I don't believe the story about his tank tipping over,
inexperienced, he was sent to find a route across a stream by himself?
And in the tank without other crew members?
Gimme a break,
I think he planned to desert and that was what got him the court martial.
And the story about escaping and being tracked by dogs??? LIES
and the gulag story of 2 guys escaping and being also tracked by dogs? Lies
I think at least 80% of the book is one lie after another
and perhaps as much as 98%
He said in the book when he was young he fantasied about becoming a
famous person.
We have a name for that kind of person: Walter Mitty.
It's amazing that he found such a gullible person to help him write this book.
The 2 books by Ginzburg and Seven Thousand Days in Siberia
by Karlo Štajner, Joel Agee (Translator)
are real stories about the gulag, and there are others,
I don't at the moment remember the authors of.
This book has so many lies I'm tempted to put it on my literary fraud bookshelf.
this is by far the worst,
in fact the only bad one.
There are no notes or other sources,
the author is the only source.
And he is recounting events that happened 50-60 years earlier.
He is the biggest liar I've ever seen.
I don't believe the story about his tank tipping over,
inexperienced, he was sent to find a route across a stream by himself?
And in the tank without other crew members?
Gimme a break,
I think he planned to desert and that was what got him the court martial.
And the story about escaping and being tracked by dogs??? LIES
and the gulag story of 2 guys escaping and being also tracked by dogs? Lies
I think at least 80% of the book is one lie after another
and perhaps as much as 98%
He said in the book when he was young he fantasied about becoming a
famous person.
We have a name for that kind of person: Walter Mitty.
It's amazing that he found such a gullible person to help him write this book.
The 2 books by Ginzburg and Seven Thousand Days in Siberia
by Karlo Štajner, Joel Agee (Translator)
are real stories about the gulag, and there are others,
I don't at the moment remember the authors of.
This book has so many lies I'm tempted to put it on my literary fraud bookshelf.
January 17, 2008
Next time I'm irritated that the big fancy grocery store is out of my favorite soy creamer, I'll shut the hell up and remember how good I have it.
March 3, 2012
Man Is Wolf to Man is the heart-wrenching story of Bardach's time spent in a Russian gulag. Why was he sent there? As a member of the Red Army, he managed to roll his tank while crossing a stream, and it was feared that the tank would fall into the hands of the enemies, the Germans. He narrowly escaped being shot, and instead was given a ten-year term in the gulag. My mind has such a hard time with that, as I come from a military family. I'm sure my family members and husbands have made errors, but fortunately they were never threatened with execution or with the thought of hard labor.
The conditions in the camps were brutal. You were barely given enough food to survive, and far less food than you needed to keep up with the minimum quota of work. Diseases like scurvy and TB were rampant. Prisoners were shuffled from one work camp to the next so as to prevent lasting relationships from forming.
It's been asked why Bardach didn't stand up and stop the horrors going on around him. When the book begins, he is barely 18, and being Jewish, is terrified of what was going on around him. By the time he gets to Kolyma and the gold mines, he is so inured to the horrors that he's witnessed -- rapes, murders, beatings, brutality -- that he knows it's better for him to just ignore it all. If he gets involved, it's he who will be raped, murdered, beaten.
This book contains a lot of foul language and graphic scenes of rape and beatings. It is not for the faint-hearted. I suspect, however, that the reality of the camps was much worse than even Bardach painted it, and for him to survive and then to go on to pioneer so many procedures for correcting cleft palates, lips, and noses, and to dedicate his life to serving those who need his skills, shows you what an amazing man he must be.
The conditions in the camps were brutal. You were barely given enough food to survive, and far less food than you needed to keep up with the minimum quota of work. Diseases like scurvy and TB were rampant. Prisoners were shuffled from one work camp to the next so as to prevent lasting relationships from forming.
It's been asked why Bardach didn't stand up and stop the horrors going on around him. When the book begins, he is barely 18, and being Jewish, is terrified of what was going on around him. By the time he gets to Kolyma and the gold mines, he is so inured to the horrors that he's witnessed -- rapes, murders, beatings, brutality -- that he knows it's better for him to just ignore it all. If he gets involved, it's he who will be raped, murdered, beaten.
This book contains a lot of foul language and graphic scenes of rape and beatings. It is not for the faint-hearted. I suspect, however, that the reality of the camps was much worse than even Bardach painted it, and for him to survive and then to go on to pioneer so many procedures for correcting cleft palates, lips, and noses, and to dedicate his life to serving those who need his skills, shows you what an amazing man he must be.
February 6, 2021
Janusz Bardach was born into a Polish Jewish family. A victim of anti-Semitic attacks throughout his adolescence, he associated himself with Jewish and left-wing organisations with dreams of social justice for all. When Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II, he joined the Red Army as a tank driver. Following an accident in which he upturned one of the tanks, he was arrested and sentenced to death. This sentence subsequently was altered to ten years' hard labour at Kolyma, the cruelest and most brutal of Stalin's gulags.
"Many people blindly dedicated to the regime, as well as people who knew nothing about politics, were randomly arrested and sentenced simply to perpetuate terror and paranoia. This was Stalin's primary means of keeping the citizens under control."
The grim reality of the whole experience is clear when Janusz is eventually released and reunited with his brother, Julek, who has married. Julek sends Janusz into the guest quarters of his house to sleep, fearing that the years he spent in the camps may have changed him and made him a danger to Julek and his young wife.
It is astounding that after all his suffering, Bardach went on to dedicate his life and work to helping others by pioneering surgical procedures for congenital facial deformities such as cleft palates that are now used across the world.
"Many people blindly dedicated to the regime, as well as people who knew nothing about politics, were randomly arrested and sentenced simply to perpetuate terror and paranoia. This was Stalin's primary means of keeping the citizens under control."
The grim reality of the whole experience is clear when Janusz is eventually released and reunited with his brother, Julek, who has married. Julek sends Janusz into the guest quarters of his house to sleep, fearing that the years he spent in the camps may have changed him and made him a danger to Julek and his young wife.
It is astounding that after all his suffering, Bardach went on to dedicate his life and work to helping others by pioneering surgical procedures for congenital facial deformities such as cleft palates that are now used across the world.
January 26, 2023
Aldilà delle sterili polemiche sulla veridicità autobiografica o meno del racconto di Janusz Bardach, questo libro merita pienamente 4 stellette ed anche qualcosa di più perchè, raccontato in prima persona, mi ha coinvolto con grande impatto emotivo, trasportandomi nel tempo e nello spazio nelle regioni estreme dell' Europa orientale, in quelle lande gelide e disumane dove la vita di un deportato non vale un centesimo. Un grande libro, un racconto toccante.
August 31, 2016
Set in the context of Gulag literature, Bardach's memoir is a little rough around the edges: at times, it reads like a personal reminiscence rather than a book. Bardach also came to the Gulag through a somewhat unconventional path: a Polish Jew, he was co-opted into the Red Army after the Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland, then after a battlefield blunder was sent to the camps and ultimately to Kolyma, where he survived through a combination of luck and shrewdness. This roughness, and the outsider's perspective, tend - somewhat surprisingly - to strengthen the book. Certainly this is one of the most immediate and brutal of the Gulag books, with beatings, rapes, and the torture of psychiatric patients among the atrocities recounted in some detail. Having read a lot of Gulag literature, it was worthy to be reminded that survival was more than the (already horrific) matter of not being shot, starving, or freezing to death. Let me be clear, though, that despite the graphic passages, this is no lurid account: Bardach is an introspective protagonist who waited for many years, and had a highly successful career as a professor of surgery, before telling his story with distance and insight. Are you new to Gulag literature? Start with Solzhenitsyn or maybe Shalimov, not Bardach. But eventually you will want to tackle this remarkable memoir showcasing the waste, brutality, and ultimate absurdity of the Soviet slave empire.
December 12, 2014
A personal account of a Polish survivor of the Soviet Gulags. It is very informative, but more than that, it is incredibly touching. His descriptions of the events, of the places are fascinating, but his brief encounters with various people, and what they left him is so moving and insightful, make this book stand out also as great literature. I've been reading a lot of books on totalitarian societies, on gulags and slave camps, this one was really a page-turner, without being sensationalistic or full of raw figures. I come back to it to find phrases that hit me but I didn't mark.
a little excerpt that gives you a taste of the way the author approaches his storytelling:
Vadim and I worked well together. I was amazed that after all he'd gone through, he could still have some feeling and interest in helping me, a total stranger. He taught me how to load and unload the wheelbarrow, how to run it safely on the boards and how to crush the rocks most effectively. He was still capable of smiling on the rare occasions when I joked with him, he liked to tell me that for a bad joke you were given five years, but for a very good one you could get twenty-five. In defiance of the widespread principle, "You die today, I die tomorrow", I had found someone who cared about me, and this proved to me that you don't have to become a beast to survive in this human wilderness.
a little excerpt that gives you a taste of the way the author approaches his storytelling:
Vadim and I worked well together. I was amazed that after all he'd gone through, he could still have some feeling and interest in helping me, a total stranger. He taught me how to load and unload the wheelbarrow, how to run it safely on the boards and how to crush the rocks most effectively. He was still capable of smiling on the rare occasions when I joked with him, he liked to tell me that for a bad joke you were given five years, but for a very good one you could get twenty-five. In defiance of the widespread principle, "You die today, I die tomorrow", I had found someone who cared about me, and this proved to me that you don't have to become a beast to survive in this human wilderness.
August 25, 2021
Probably the best memoir I've read about the gulags so far, and there's some fierce competition. While I'm very familiar with the details of life in the gulags by this point it's always fascinating to see it from new perspectives, and Bardach's detailed writing style is absolutely addictive. It's the most comprehensive one I've read so far, following a more linear narrative and moving chronologically through the time period rather than having events grouped by experiences or themes, and this made it absolutely impossible to put down. It was just everything I hoped a good, solid memoir would be, and it added an extra layer of perspective and information as this is the first full account I've read from the point of view of a Jewish prisoner. Dealing with the fallout of both the labour camps and the Holocaust is an absolutely incomprehensible horror, but Bardach does an excellent job at putting words to the indescribable.
February 19, 2025
This is kinda crazy. When he starts talking about the gulag and the father and son just getting shot right then in there kinda scary.
August 20, 2014
This book was an excellent testament to the human spirit. It was detailed in the account it provided, thus giving the reader a strong vision of the mentality which existed in wartime Russia. I thoroughly enjoyed the variety of people that were encountered by the author during his time in the gulags - this varied from those who were helpful and selfless to those only interested in self preservation and who would watch others suffering in order to benefit their own predicament.
The book was also excellently written, providing a graphic and at times harrowing account. I found the description of the 'isolator' particularly disturbing as well as the depiction of the authors experiences in the psychiatric ward where he eventually worked.
All round this was one of the best books I have read in some years and was written in a very evocative manner. It benefited from the illustration of the torment and distress which such an experience can cause, as well as the manner in which the human spirit can triumph over adversity. In a paradoxical way, it made me feel good to be alive.
The book was also excellently written, providing a graphic and at times harrowing account. I found the description of the 'isolator' particularly disturbing as well as the depiction of the authors experiences in the psychiatric ward where he eventually worked.
All round this was one of the best books I have read in some years and was written in a very evocative manner. It benefited from the illustration of the torment and distress which such an experience can cause, as well as the manner in which the human spirit can triumph over adversity. In a paradoxical way, it made me feel good to be alive.
March 7, 2018
This book. Wow. I truly don't know where to start. My professor warned us it would be brutal. I didn't believe him until I started reading and immediately lost my appetite. This book has made me question what it means to be human, and rightful so. The horrors on every page somehow only get worse. At times, in a book full of sorrow, it is easier to become accustomed to the pain. But here, Bardach succeeds in keeping the reader surprised and wounded at each chapter. Each time I thought things couldn't get any worse, they did. I would like to think that this could never happen here, in 2018, in the US, on my college campus with my friends and classmates, but I feel it could. Violence, however small, once started only grows until it eats itself out of existence, taking everything else with it. Chelovek cheloveku volk.
February 25, 2015
One of the best WWII books I've read. Like Eugenia Ginsburg, Janusz has a series of fortunate happenings in his prison sentence in the gulag that allow him to survive. Unlike Eugenia, he hasn't censored any of the gruesome violence in his story, which makes the book hard to recommend to others. The title is an oxymoron, because he manages to maintain his humanity and emotional connections to his family and spouse despite the years of starvation and cruelty experienced in Russia. The story leaves the impression that the Nazis and NKVD, Communism and Fascism, were the same wolf.
February 22, 2020
Where to start? Published in 1993 this work(?) seems to take Shalamov's Kolyma Tales and add dialogue along with the author as the main character.
Why? Ok to start Bardach wants the reader to believe that he dug his grave then some how the next day was granted a reprieve. OK I'm buying. But, Bardach states that he saw German tanks rolling along the road when he was waiting with his tank for tank recovery. SO this armor unit is behind the lines and is waiting 24 hours so it can courts martial Enemies of the State? Then another 24 hours and transport is found for those condemned to Kolyma. Two days and the truck carrying the prisoners gets through German lines, to a NKVD prison, and Bardach survives again to get placed in a cattle car. Cattle cars that could and would be more valuable carrying cattle. OK maybe was born under a lucky star. His luck can't last forever.
Oh but it can. In the cattle car he finds some loose boards, forces them and escapes. The NKVD canine units go after him. At this point one needs to read Faithfull Ruslan by Vladimov for what should happen. Some how Bardach is saved again beaten but alive he arrives at a transit camp then on to Burepolom where he works after a beating so bad he is peeing blood. OK now his luck must run out.
No dice. He starts his tour across Russia on the top bunk. Screeching brakes here. For those who have never read anything about the Gulags, the top bunk on transport in transit prisons and in the camps belongs to the actual thieves. Murders, safecrackers, rapists, burglars, etc, not to any politicals or those convicted under Army regulations, NO just thieves. This has been true since the Tsars first sent political prisoners and regular thieves to Siberia. Read Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. So how is he on the top bunk? Thieves were the NKVD's best informants on the politicals. Every cell, every Black Maria, every railcar had an informant sometimes a thief, sometimes another political. The same cells and transport had thieves in each group. So how did Bardach get a top bunk with an air vent? At a transit prison he says he befriended a Head Thief and used this mans name a skill set to continue to ride in top bunks across Siberia. Now at this point I'm saying to myself with all the luck Bardach is having no wonder six million Jews were killed in Nazi Germany: God was way to busy keeping this guy safe. I digress.
His luck continues in Nakhodka where he gets stabbed but survives, on ship he meets another thief who takes him and his friend, also stabbed, under his protection, in Magadan he gets a good brigade leader who takes care of him and the rest of the brigade, this part I believe as having good god brigade commanders is mentioned in both Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and A Day In The Life. Also by Shalamov and Vladimov works.
I could continue ad nauseum about the story line, but I won't. I will now go off on the style.
Bardach wrote this for a Western audience. The prose are poor and extremely melodramatic. Paragraph after paragraph of soul searching words about his parents, first wife, brother, current camp wife, the meaning of life, the unfairness of life, etc, etc. The anguished self appraisal is better suited for a Tella Novella, they are VERY dramatic, or a poorly written episode of General Hospital or Days of Our Lives. I believe Bardach thinks he can write as well as Dostoevsky or Lermontov. But nobody has been able to write as well as those two greats of Russian lit, with some notable exceptions: Sorkin, Rybakov, T. Tolstaya, and Bulgakov. The writing is short and choppy when it's not run on and self searching. This is an extremely fast read. It is the FASTEST 350 page +Russian read I have ever read. Check my read list and look at how much Russian lit I've read. It's a LOT.
OK, Humble brag but as I said this work seems more like Bardach embellished his own experience in Kolyma with the stories he heard from other prisoners. Or when asked to write his biography he used Shalamov's Kolyma Tales a blueprint to give his own "Biography" a little more oomph. This applies from the time he dug his grave until his release. His command of the English should have been fixed by his editor, but it wasn't. For both these reasons the best I can give this is a one. The first one I've ever given. I usually find some redeeming value in any work, but not in this one. If you have NEVER read any work on life in the Gulag OK, this is a quick read. If you have a minimal understanding about the Soviet/Tsarist penal system leave this one for the new to Russian lit crowd, this was a wasted two days of read and two weeks in anticipation of this novels arrival as a library ILL.
Why? Ok to start Bardach wants the reader to believe that he dug his grave then some how the next day was granted a reprieve. OK I'm buying. But, Bardach states that he saw German tanks rolling along the road when he was waiting with his tank for tank recovery. SO this armor unit is behind the lines and is waiting 24 hours so it can courts martial Enemies of the State? Then another 24 hours and transport is found for those condemned to Kolyma. Two days and the truck carrying the prisoners gets through German lines, to a NKVD prison, and Bardach survives again to get placed in a cattle car. Cattle cars that could and would be more valuable carrying cattle. OK maybe was born under a lucky star. His luck can't last forever.
Oh but it can. In the cattle car he finds some loose boards, forces them and escapes. The NKVD canine units go after him. At this point one needs to read Faithfull Ruslan by Vladimov for what should happen. Some how Bardach is saved again beaten but alive he arrives at a transit camp then on to Burepolom where he works after a beating so bad he is peeing blood. OK now his luck must run out.
No dice. He starts his tour across Russia on the top bunk. Screeching brakes here. For those who have never read anything about the Gulags, the top bunk on transport in transit prisons and in the camps belongs to the actual thieves. Murders, safecrackers, rapists, burglars, etc, not to any politicals or those convicted under Army regulations, NO just thieves. This has been true since the Tsars first sent political prisoners and regular thieves to Siberia. Read Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. So how is he on the top bunk? Thieves were the NKVD's best informants on the politicals. Every cell, every Black Maria, every railcar had an informant sometimes a thief, sometimes another political. The same cells and transport had thieves in each group. So how did Bardach get a top bunk with an air vent? At a transit prison he says he befriended a Head Thief and used this mans name a skill set to continue to ride in top bunks across Siberia. Now at this point I'm saying to myself with all the luck Bardach is having no wonder six million Jews were killed in Nazi Germany: God was way to busy keeping this guy safe. I digress.
His luck continues in Nakhodka where he gets stabbed but survives, on ship he meets another thief who takes him and his friend, also stabbed, under his protection, in Magadan he gets a good brigade leader who takes care of him and the rest of the brigade, this part I believe as having good god brigade commanders is mentioned in both Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and A Day In The Life. Also by Shalamov and Vladimov works.
I could continue ad nauseum about the story line, but I won't. I will now go off on the style.
Bardach wrote this for a Western audience. The prose are poor and extremely melodramatic. Paragraph after paragraph of soul searching words about his parents, first wife, brother, current camp wife, the meaning of life, the unfairness of life, etc, etc. The anguished self appraisal is better suited for a Tella Novella, they are VERY dramatic, or a poorly written episode of General Hospital or Days of Our Lives. I believe Bardach thinks he can write as well as Dostoevsky or Lermontov. But nobody has been able to write as well as those two greats of Russian lit, with some notable exceptions: Sorkin, Rybakov, T. Tolstaya, and Bulgakov. The writing is short and choppy when it's not run on and self searching. This is an extremely fast read. It is the FASTEST 350 page +Russian read I have ever read. Check my read list and look at how much Russian lit I've read. It's a LOT.
OK, Humble brag but as I said this work seems more like Bardach embellished his own experience in Kolyma with the stories he heard from other prisoners. Or when asked to write his biography he used Shalamov's Kolyma Tales a blueprint to give his own "Biography" a little more oomph. This applies from the time he dug his grave until his release. His command of the English should have been fixed by his editor, but it wasn't. For both these reasons the best I can give this is a one. The first one I've ever given. I usually find some redeeming value in any work, but not in this one. If you have NEVER read any work on life in the Gulag OK, this is a quick read. If you have a minimal understanding about the Soviet/Tsarist penal system leave this one for the new to Russian lit crowd, this was a wasted two days of read and two weeks in anticipation of this novels arrival as a library ILL.
August 11, 2019
Es una memoria que esta muy bien redactada y que aporta muchos datos curiosos y nuevos en el tema del gulag. Digo nuevos para mí, a partir del número de memorias que me he leído. Una cosa que quiero destacar, es la historia de este prisionero ya que la manera en la que es sentenciado a los campos de concentración soviéticos, es muy curiosa y no se ve en todas las memorias. Su trayectoria por el gulag es muy variada, ya que va a estar en numerosos campos de concentración soviéticos, en muchas prisiones y va a realizar muchos viajes para ir de un lado a otro hasta llegar a sus zonas de cautiverio. Además, cuando el sale de los campos, es muy curiosa e impactante la vida que va a vivir después de todos los años de cautiverio.
Una de las cosas que más me han gustado en el libro, es que este prisionero tuvo mucha relación y un constante acercamiento a los Urkis, y esto es muy interesante ya que hay muchas memorias que sólo los citan y no hablan muchos de ellos. Es impresionante la gran cantidad de aspectos y situaciones que nos aporta, ya que aporta mucha información sobre los Urkis. Esta memorias nos permiten conocer mucho mejor a estos prisioneros, que además eran muy relevantes en los campos de concentración soviéticos.
Otra cosa que me ha gustado, es la profesión que ejerce en los campos de concentración. Muchos de los prisioneros que sobrevivieron y pudieron escribir sus memorias, nos hablan de los hospitales y de los médicos en los campos de concentración soviéticos. Este autor al trabajar como asistente médico, nos muestra una cara oculta y muy importante del campo, que son los hospitales. A través de sus memorias, nos podemos dar cuenta de lo mal que lo pasaban los prisioneros con las enfermedades o lo mal que lo pasaban tanto médicos, enfermeros o asistentes médicos debido a la falta de material médico. La búsqueda de alternativas para poder tener material médico o poder tratar una enfermedad, es muy interesante.
Pero el libro tiene una cosa que no me ha gustado nada y por eso, le pongo 4 estrellas. En algunas partes de la memorias, especialmente en las últimas 100 hojas de este libro, encontramos partes que se notan que son muy novelescas y no se notan muchas veces creíbles. Estas partes que señalo, se refieren a temas románticos y hace que muchas veces está memoria parezca una novela romántica y te saque del tema principal, que son los gulag. Se nota que la intervención de Kathleen Gleeson, siendo escritora, hace que muchas veces tenga partes muy novelescas. Tengo que señalar una cosa muy importante, si estás memorias hubieran sido redactadas por el propio Janusz Bardach, el libro sería mucho más corto e identificarias las descripciones que hace del gulag al instante.
Para concluir, quiero señalar que es una memoria muy interesante y que se la recomiendo a la gente, ya que te va aportar datos muy curiosos sobre el gulag. Además, tengo que destacar que esta muy bien redactada y se lee muy bien.
Una de las cosas que más me han gustado en el libro, es que este prisionero tuvo mucha relación y un constante acercamiento a los Urkis, y esto es muy interesante ya que hay muchas memorias que sólo los citan y no hablan muchos de ellos. Es impresionante la gran cantidad de aspectos y situaciones que nos aporta, ya que aporta mucha información sobre los Urkis. Esta memorias nos permiten conocer mucho mejor a estos prisioneros, que además eran muy relevantes en los campos de concentración soviéticos.
Otra cosa que me ha gustado, es la profesión que ejerce en los campos de concentración. Muchos de los prisioneros que sobrevivieron y pudieron escribir sus memorias, nos hablan de los hospitales y de los médicos en los campos de concentración soviéticos. Este autor al trabajar como asistente médico, nos muestra una cara oculta y muy importante del campo, que son los hospitales. A través de sus memorias, nos podemos dar cuenta de lo mal que lo pasaban los prisioneros con las enfermedades o lo mal que lo pasaban tanto médicos, enfermeros o asistentes médicos debido a la falta de material médico. La búsqueda de alternativas para poder tener material médico o poder tratar una enfermedad, es muy interesante.
Pero el libro tiene una cosa que no me ha gustado nada y por eso, le pongo 4 estrellas. En algunas partes de la memorias, especialmente en las últimas 100 hojas de este libro, encontramos partes que se notan que son muy novelescas y no se notan muchas veces creíbles. Estas partes que señalo, se refieren a temas románticos y hace que muchas veces está memoria parezca una novela romántica y te saque del tema principal, que son los gulag. Se nota que la intervención de Kathleen Gleeson, siendo escritora, hace que muchas veces tenga partes muy novelescas. Tengo que señalar una cosa muy importante, si estás memorias hubieran sido redactadas por el propio Janusz Bardach, el libro sería mucho más corto e identificarias las descripciones que hace del gulag al instante.
Para concluir, quiero señalar que es una memoria muy interesante y que se la recomiendo a la gente, ya que te va aportar datos muy curiosos sobre el gulag. Además, tengo que destacar que esta muy bien redactada y se lee muy bien.
March 3, 2021
Autobiographical narrative of a Jewish man from Poland. Young and idealistic, he joins the Red Army to fight the Nazis, but when he overturns his tank in a stream, he is accused of sabotage and sent to the gulag.
I never knew that after the invasion of Poland, eastern Poland was absorbed in to the USSR as "Western Ukraine." That seems pretty rude. They didn't even get to be Polish SSR.
In some respects a pretty interesting story, but I found myself not really liking the narrator that much. I think he is around 24 when he is released from captivity shortly after the end of the war. Maybe I'm expecting too much from such a young guy, but what came across for me was a person without any real principles, motivated only by the desire to survive and lead a happy life. God is scarcely mentioned, nor is there ever really a moment when the author is struck by the wrongness of Communism, other than on account of the harm that has come to him because of it. He sees the grinding poverty in the USSR compared to the abundance he grew up with in Poland. He sees the wanton destruction of human life in the camps. But he never seems to put two and two together and articulate that all this suffering is being caused by this political and economic system being wrong about human nature and the human spirit.
He spends 5 years in the gulag, including Kolyma, and is close to death several times. He contracts tuberculosis. I kept wanting his suffering to transform him into a better person, but nothing like that seems to happen. He encounters a lot of anti-semitism, but does this motivate him to learn more about and embrace his heritage as one of God's chosen people? Nope.
The book doesn't live up to it's title. "Man is Wolf to Man", sounds provocative, but all we really get are some true stories about human cruelty. What is it about us that gives us the idea that inflicting suffering and death on others is bad? Wolves don't have that. Why is it that one culture fans the flames of human cruelty where another keeps that behavior under control? You won't find answers or even questions like these here.
I never knew that after the invasion of Poland, eastern Poland was absorbed in to the USSR as "Western Ukraine." That seems pretty rude. They didn't even get to be Polish SSR.
In some respects a pretty interesting story, but I found myself not really liking the narrator that much. I think he is around 24 when he is released from captivity shortly after the end of the war. Maybe I'm expecting too much from such a young guy, but what came across for me was a person without any real principles, motivated only by the desire to survive and lead a happy life. God is scarcely mentioned, nor is there ever really a moment when the author is struck by the wrongness of Communism, other than on account of the harm that has come to him because of it. He sees the grinding poverty in the USSR compared to the abundance he grew up with in Poland. He sees the wanton destruction of human life in the camps. But he never seems to put two and two together and articulate that all this suffering is being caused by this political and economic system being wrong about human nature and the human spirit.
He spends 5 years in the gulag, including Kolyma, and is close to death several times. He contracts tuberculosis. I kept wanting his suffering to transform him into a better person, but nothing like that seems to happen. He encounters a lot of anti-semitism, but does this motivate him to learn more about and embrace his heritage as one of God's chosen people? Nope.
The book doesn't live up to it's title. "Man is Wolf to Man", sounds provocative, but all we really get are some true stories about human cruelty. What is it about us that gives us the idea that inflicting suffering and death on others is bad? Wolves don't have that. Why is it that one culture fans the flames of human cruelty where another keeps that behavior under control? You won't find answers or even questions like these here.
December 2, 2022
Rating: 5 🌟
🐺 Man is Wolf to Man is an autobiography that focuses on Bardach's time in the gulags, and what led him to being forced into the gulags.
If you do not know what a gulag is - it is a work camp. During WWII Stalin set up these work camps and sent prisoners there. You could go into the work camp for counter-revolutionary acts, such as telling a political joke against Stalin, or for real crimes like murder. Many people in the work camps were falsely accused of their crimes and signed the papers to go to these camps so they would no longer be beaten and interrogated. It is important to note many people died in these camps due to starvation, injuries, and freezing to death.
My thoughts: It took me 6 years to read this book. It was assigned in my USSR In WWII class, which I ended up dropping because this book gave me insane nightmares. Each page reveals something tragic that happened to Bardach. No human should have to suffer through what this man has. I do believe everyone should read this book at some point in their lives. You read about the topics of hope, mental disorders, racism, and politics. Although, I must warn you all, this book is not for the faint of heart.
Quote from the book: "Janusz, you have no idea what a human being can live through. A horse would die, an elephant would die, but a human can survive so many hardships, so many tortures, so much pain that it defies understanding."
🐺 Man is Wolf to Man is an autobiography that focuses on Bardach's time in the gulags, and what led him to being forced into the gulags.
If you do not know what a gulag is - it is a work camp. During WWII Stalin set up these work camps and sent prisoners there. You could go into the work camp for counter-revolutionary acts, such as telling a political joke against Stalin, or for real crimes like murder. Many people in the work camps were falsely accused of their crimes and signed the papers to go to these camps so they would no longer be beaten and interrogated. It is important to note many people died in these camps due to starvation, injuries, and freezing to death.
My thoughts: It took me 6 years to read this book. It was assigned in my USSR In WWII class, which I ended up dropping because this book gave me insane nightmares. Each page reveals something tragic that happened to Bardach. No human should have to suffer through what this man has. I do believe everyone should read this book at some point in their lives. You read about the topics of hope, mental disorders, racism, and politics. Although, I must warn you all, this book is not for the faint of heart.
Quote from the book: "Janusz, you have no idea what a human being can live through. A horse would die, an elephant would die, but a human can survive so many hardships, so many tortures, so much pain that it defies understanding."
May 6, 2025
Another book on one of my topics of endless fascination and horror...the malignant Soviet communist killing machine and their instruments of torture in this case the gulags the soviets built (or in some cases taken over from tsarist times but made infinitely worse) around the start of the WWII. The story is the experience of the author, a Polish Jew from the bourgeoisie who of course gets swallowed up in the soviet advancement into Poland and taken a journey to hell alongside all other indiscriminate victims of the communist monster all the way into the gold mines of Kolyma. The story is told from a first person perspective, written with the help if a creative writer years in latter days in the US. The narrative is what I could call, hyper-realist gulag experience atrocity which after a while desensitises readers of this gulag lore leaving only the feeling of indescribable powerlessness in the face of communist utopia re-enacted. Like being steam rolled by a truck. Or worse...far worse.
September 1, 2020
Jansz Bardach recounts his often horrendous odyssey from the son of a dentist in Poland at the start of WWII, through the Russian Siberia of Siberia's (gulag) as a political prisoner, and eventually to Medical School and the U.S. He ended up a noted Plastic Surgeon in Iowa City, Iowa at U. I's College of Medicine.
September 29, 2025
This is in the "you can't make this stuff up" category.
I've read many prisoner stories - the Holocaust, POW camps, the Gulag. Often horrifying tales of man's inhumanity to man, while at the same time, stories of humanity, brotherhood, and fortitude. This one is well told, engaging, and not too bleak.
It's Bardach's tale, but I give a fair amount of credit to Gleeson.
I've read many prisoner stories - the Holocaust, POW camps, the Gulag. Often horrifying tales of man's inhumanity to man, while at the same time, stories of humanity, brotherhood, and fortitude. This one is well told, engaging, and not too bleak.
It's Bardach's tale, but I give a fair amount of credit to Gleeson.
October 27, 2023
I enjoyed this book so much that I've given it as gifts to a few family members. It's an unbelievable tale about suffering and hardship at the hands of horrible people. I was completely engaged throughout.
August 10, 2017
This book gives an insightful look into a man's personal experiences with the soviet union during WWII.
December 5, 2017
This is a true story and is difficult to read because the true story is so tragic and brutal. He survived imprisonment and torture in a Russian prison camp but his story of survival is worth it.
January 15, 2019
Incredible story of survival, disillusionment with an ideology, and the human mind. Similar to 'An American in the Gulag', this book deserves to be more widely read.
September 14, 2020
One of the most harrowing tales of survival I've ever read. I still cannot belive that there are people who think the USSR was a good thing
November 1, 2020
"Life is the price you pay for someone else's orgasm."
- Lara by Younes El Hamidi
- Download link: https://www.mediafire.com/download/3p...
- Lara by Younes El Hamidi
- Download link: https://www.mediafire.com/download/3p...
January 9, 2022
Chelovek Cheloveku Volk. On how circumstances carves a person, and people nudge circumstances.
April 6, 2023
Excellent, dramatic, unbelievable read. How the author survived such atrocious conditions is difficult to comprend.
November 29, 2023
One of the best books I’ve ever read.
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