Man is Wolf to Man

Janusz Bardach was just 21 years old when he was drafted from his hometown in Poland into the Red Army. As a Jew, he was eager to fight the Nazis, but only a year later he became a prisoner of the Stalinist regime after accidentally rolling his tank. He was forced to dig a grave and sleep in it before he was sentenced to death; but was rescued by a NKVD officer (NKVD was the precursor to the KGB), who saw to it that his sentence was converted to 10 years at hard labor. Over the next four years, Bardach was sent to first one camp and then another, enduring near starvation, torture, illness, and backbreaking labor. In the book, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag, which he co-wrote with Kathleen Gleeson, he recounts in excruciating detail the hardships he survived.

Despite the grisly circumstances of his imprisonment and the horrible treatment he received from some of the other prisoners and guards, Bardach finds beauty in the desolate wilderness of Kolyma and friendship with a few fellow prisoners, which nurture his will to live. He finds that survival depends on shutting out thoughts of anything other than getting through each day.

“…The only way to fend off despair and depression was not to think. I learned to shut out everything, to escape into the safety of my own space. Thoughts crawled into my mind like serpents, but I learned to sever them with the thrust of a shovel or pickax. I broke time down into hours, so that I only had to exercise my will for short periods – from waking up until noon, from noon until the evening meal, from the evening roll call until bedtime. I forbade myself to think about the days ahead or about the length of my sentence. I nearly banished thoughts of home because it took only a moment of lost concentration to slow down, fall into a hole, irritate somebody, not make the norm. Only mechanical movements mattered: shoveling the earth, chopping up the permafrost, loading and unloading the wheelbarrow. Fighting, quarreling, hunger, and thoughts of suicide broke prisoners down, and I veered away from these hazards and kept up my steady, relentless course…”

He is also protected by a series of what I can only call “guardian angels” who recognize his humanity and goodness and go out of their way to shield him from the Stalinist regime. Using his limited knowledge of Latin and medical terminology, he convinces guards and prison doctors (who were prisoners themselves) that he had completed 3 years of medical school and is assigned duty in a hospital while he is recovering from injuries sustained in a horrible beating. It is here, in caring for dying patients, that he discovers his own humanity and the sensitivity that would in later years lead him to become a renowned physician. Alas, he himself nearly dies from tuberculosis, but this too becomes an experience from which he draws great compassion for patients.

The book is remarkable, not only for the unimaginable but true story it tells, but also for its relevance today. Under Stalin, dissent was unacceptable and treated in the harshest possible manner. People were arrested and tortured for the vaguest of offenses and often gave up false information implicating others in order to end their torture (a lesson so often repeated yet ignored by people who think torture is an effective way of gathering intelligence). But the greatest lesson is that our individual and collective survival depends on our ability to care for each other.