About book Man Is Wolf To Man: Surviving The Gulag (1999)
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.
This is a well-written, detailed, and engrossing account of the author's oppression, arrest, and imprisonment at the hands of the Soviet Union during World War 2. It's different from similar accounts since Bardach was a Polish Jew rather than a native Russian. For him, the Soviet Union was a paradise of socialism and equality. That is, until the Soviets controlled his portion of Poland, exported several people to camps (one of the most compelling sections of the book, since he was dragged along as an unwilling accomplice) and generally did what the Soviets always did: make life hell. Eager to fight the Nazis and prove his loyalty to the USSR, Bardach joined the Red Army, and was arrested after losing his tank, since that was an obvious act of espionage that showed he was helping the Nazis. From there, the account traces his travels across the Soviet Union all the way to the dreaded Kolyma camp complex, where he luckily made good friends and found a job in a hospital rather than in the gold mines. The author doesn't mention this (I wish he would have), but I wonder if his socialist ideals survived his experience. Did he still remain a socialist, or was he simply anti-Stalin while remaining a believer in communism? I suspect not, but that would have been an interesting way to end this memoir.
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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.
—Karen
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.
—Andrew
Janusz Bardach was a Jew living in eastern Poland when World War 2 broke out. His home town was in the Russian occupation zone and he was drafted into the Soviet Red Army. At the outset of the German invasion of Russia he fell foul of the NKVD and was sent to Kolyma in the Soviet Far East - a notorious part of the Gulag Archipelago.Janusz could and should have died several times over during his prison sentence, but by amazing luck and not a little animal cunning he managed to survive. His account of the brutal conditions in the camps is extraordinary.It is ironic that if he had stayed in his home town or remained in the Red Army he would almost certainly have died. His parents were murdered by the Nazis and life chances in the Russian Army in 41 were not god. Going to Kolyma saved his life.Worth a read - as is Kolyma Tales by Shalamov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Koly...
—Ray
