Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121398 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 408 pages

Amazon.com Review
In 1941, accidentally rolling a Soviet tank while fording a river was considered a death offense by the Red Army. Unfortunately for young Janusz Bardach, he committed just such an error; lucky for him that 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 labor in Siberia. For the next four years, Bardach endured hellish conditions in various labor camps--first a logging camp, then a gold mine in 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 labor 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.

From Publishers Weekly
When the Red Army first arrived in the Polish town of Wlodzimierz-Wolynski in 1939, Bardach, a Polish Jew, was overjoyed believing that this army from the brave, new Soviet society was there to fight the Germans. He little dreamed that Poland would be partitioned in accord with the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. After witnessing deportations and gratuitous brutality, Bardach was rather more skeptical by the time he was drafted into the Red Army in 1940. Soon after, he was sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison, and it's here in the labyrinthine world of the Soviet gulag that Bardach's gripping but matter-of-fact memoir really begins. Shipped from camp to camp, Bardach ends up as a zek, a prison laborer, at the gold mines of Kolyma in Far Eastern Russia. Along the way, he encounters the random cruelty of Soviet prison life and the almost incomprehensible combination of harsh conditions and constant death that can break the human spirit. But even in these desensitizing conditions, certain individuals retained their humanity, such as Efim Polzun, a fellow Jew and Soviet officer, who got Bardach's sentence commuted, or Dr. Piasetsky, who let Bardach lie his way into a job as a clinic assistant. More than many such memoirs, this volume clearly manifests the constant struggle between maintaining one's life and maintaining one's humanity in inhumane situations. A fascinating history, this compelling memoir is also a story of inner resolve and the will to keep going. It's a worthy companion to such accounts as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and Natalya Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind. 26 b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
No matter how often one reads of life in the Gulagand this is one of the best accountsone is still chilled by the extent of man's capacity for evil. This account by Bardach, now a surgeon at the University of Iowa, is, however, more nuanced, though there is no lack of brutality in this story of how he survived. A Polish Jew who admired the Soviet Union and wanted to fight for social justice, he was conscripted into the Red Army when it overran his area of Poland after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact carved up the country. He appeared before a drumhead court-martial for losing his tank after the Germans attacked Russia in 1941 and was sentenced to ten years in the camps. For several weeks he crossed the Soviet Union in a closed cattle-truck, from which he escaped, and upon recapture he was almost beaten to death, being saved only by an officer who did not want the bureaucratic hassle of dealing with a death certificate. Among his worst experiences were his time in the mines, with the bitter cold, the pitiful rations, and the relentless work; and the long trip by sea to the Kolyma Peninsula, during which the male prisoners broke into the women's hold and literally raped many of them to death. And yet through it all, he says, it was his fate to meet people who not only saved my life but also showed me how to remain sensitive, people like Dr. Piasetsky, who pretended to believe that he had been a medical student, and let him stay as a hospital assistant, which saved him from the gold mines. To survive the Gulag you needed strength and luck, and Bardach had a good measure of both, but it is our good fortune that in doing so he has contributed to our knowledge of the human condition. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Incredible!
This is one of those rare non-fiction books reading more like a gripping novel that's hard to put down. As with most books, it's best if you save the foreword for last. The second chapter is one of the most depressing accounts that you'll ever come across, but it's worth sticking with the story to the end.

The writing and translation is absolutely impeccable. I felt like I personally experienced each of the author's highs and lows in the Gulag as they were related. This is a rare look inside the system that swallowed up so many of the best and brightest people.

It is too bad that Hollywood is so obsessed with the dozen or so screenwriters who lost their jobs in 1950's America to the anti-communist investigations because any one of the many films devoted to their plight would have been better served by profiling just a single member of the millions who perished in the Soviet Gulag.

Archetype of the American Dream
I grew up in Iowa City around the corner from Dr. Bardach. I delivered his newspaper when I was a kid and used to see him and his wife at local tennis clubs. That's all I knew about him-until I was 30 and my parents were reading his book. When they told me what it was about, I was stunned! I couldn't put the book down. His story is riveting. How on earth does a Polish Jew in WWII go from a hard labor camp in Siberia to being a renowned surgeon at a large teaching hospital in the middle of Iowa? It puts life into perspective and will remind you that anything is possible. Dr. Bardach truly lived the American dream.

Haunting and difficult to read
This book is the most daunting first hand account of the Gulag that I have read. Voices from the Gulag and Through the Whirlwind are also well-written accounts. Man is Wolf caputures the brutal experience with power and eloquence. From a literary standpoint it is a simple read but from a human perspective it is devastating. I had to stop reading on anumber of occasions to keep from being in enveloped by the horror of the book. This book will change your perspective on human nature, WWII and Eastern Europe.