A01=Janusz Bardach
A01=Kathleen Gleeson
Author_Janusz Bardach
Author_Kathleen Gleeson
belarussian front
biography
Category=DNBM1
Category=JPVR
Category=NHD
citizen
court martial
dictator
diplomacy
diplomat
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
freedom
gold mines
grief
gulag
hard labor
healing
injured soldier
kolyma
labor camps
loss
medical student
memoir
military
moscow
nazis
nonfiction
polish embassy
political prisoner
postwar moscow
postwar russia
prison system
prisoner
prisoner of war
ptsd
recovery
red army
redemption
repression
russia
russian history
siberia
soldier
soviet union
stalin
stalinist moscow
stalinist russia
suffering
ussr
war hero
Product details
- ISBN 9780520237353
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 1941, as a Red Army soldier fighting the Nazis on the Belarussian front, Janusz Bardach was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Twenty-two years old, he had committed no crime. He was one of millions swept up in the reign of terror that Stalin perpetrated on his own people. In the critically acclaimed Man Is Wolf to Man, Bardach recounted his horrific experiences in the Kolyma labor camps in northeastern Siberia, the deadliest camps in Stalin's gulag system. In this sequel Bardach picks up the narrative in March 1946, when he was released. He traces his thousand-mile journey from the northeastern Siberian gold mines to Moscow in the period after the war, when the country was still in turmoil. He chronicles his reunion with his brother, a high-ranking diplomat in the Polish embassy in Moscow; his experiences as a medical student in the Stalinist Soviet Union; and his trip back to his hometown, where he confronts the shattering realization of the toll the war has taken, including the deaths of his wife, parents, and sister.
In a trenchant exploration of loss, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and existential loneliness, Bardach plumbs his ordeal with honesty and compassion, affording a literary window into the soul of a Stalinist gulag survivor. Surviving Freedom is his moving account of how he rebuilt his life after tremendous hardship and personal loss. It is also a unique portrait of postwar Stalinist Moscow as seen through the eyes of a person who is both an insider and outsider. Bardach's journey from prisoner back to citizen and from labor camp to freedom is an inspiring tale of the universal human story of suffering and recovery.
Until his recent death, Janusz Bardach was Professor Emeritus of Plastic Surgery at the University of Iowa. Kathleen Gleeson is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. Together they wrote Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag (California, 1998).
