Surviving Freedom After the Gulag

In 1941, as a Red Army soldier fighting the Nazis on the Belorussian front, Janusz Bardach was arrested, court-martialled and sentenced to ten years of hard labour. He was released in 1946 but faced many more traumatic experiences. This text tells the second part of his story.

"Like Primo Levi's The Truce, Surviving Freedom is about the 'return' from agony and horror to numbed and groping normality. Bardach's 'normality' was postwar Moscow and Stalin's last Terror. This is an unforgettable book."—Martin Amis

"I find Surviving Freedom a unique exploration of the identity that comes only after great suffering. Survivors of atrocities are confronted with the task of reconciling their past in order to build a new future. Bardach is one of the few to have written so eloquently about this transition."—Simon Wiesenthal

"Bardach's account of his life in Stalin's postwar Moscow proves that trauma does not need to leave one bitter or broken. This memoir is an inspiration to anyone who has suffered and struggled to rebuild a life."—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost

"In this haunting book Bardach achieves his rightful place shoulder to shoulder with Primo Levi, Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and other literary witnesses of the holocaust of the twentieth century."—Paul Goldberg, author of The Thaw Generation

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.