Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin's Gulag
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When Nazis invaded Poland, Janusz Bardach was 20. He escaped to join the Red Army but his criticism of the regime led to a sentence of ten years hard labour. In this text, he describes life in the Siberian gulag - the terror and cruelty, the near-starvation and back-breaking physical labour.
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.
| Author | Janusz Bardach, Kathleen Gleeson |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Place | London |
| Year | 1999 |
| ISBN | 9780684840475 |
| Binding | Paperback |
| Condition | Very Good |
| Comments | Yellowed pages. |
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