Books 2010: you die today, I die tomorrow

[hawkwing_lb]

Books 2010: 7

non-fiction

7. Janusz Bardach and Katherine Gleeson, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998.

In the handful of accounts by gulag survivors I've read, the thing that stands out most is just how much luck played a part in their survival. And just how much the system seemed designed to reduce human beings to barbarity, starvation and death in relatively short order.

Janusz Bardach, a Polish Jew conscripted into the Soviet army after the partition of Poland, and sentenced to ten years in the gulag on foot of an accident with a tank, was one of the fortunate ones. If such a term can ever be applied. He survived Kolyma by dint of - after a year in a mining camp - lying himself into a spot as a medical assistant, and after the war ended, his brother, a colonel in the Polish army, succeeded in arranging for his early release. (He went on to become a pioneering reconstructive surgeon, in charge of reconstructive surgery at the School of Medicine in Lodz and, from the 1970s, chair of a plastic surgery division at the University of Iowa. Really a remarkable achievement. He died in 2002, at the age of eighty-three.)

His account of his journey from Woldzimierz-Wolynski to Kolyma - and, more amazingly, back - is harrowing. And I use that word advisedly. Bardach - like many other memoirists of the gulag - is remarkably matter-of-fact about his personal sufferings: but it impossible to escape the awareness that he was one of, over the lifetime of the gulag, millions, and the impossible thing that went by the acronym GULAG is too vast and too terrible to really comprehend. The ubiquity of torture, rape, disease, starvation, suffering, death: the fantastical whims of the Soviet state whereby interrogator and NKVD man might end up sleeping next to someone whom they had tortured and arrested only months before - Bardach (and his co-author) don't shy from being explicit, but still, the sheer enormity of the thing only emerges by implication.

I don't really have words for how this book makes me feel. It makes me remember why I stopped reading gulag memoirs after I read Ginsberg: even though human beings find grace in the farthest extremity of suffering and existence, it makes me feel sick to my stomach and helpless and enraged to read about it. Even though these things happened far away and years ago. Perhaps even because of that.

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Aye, Holocaust and Gulag memoirs are terrible to read. I can take them only in small doses, and only when not already depressed -- except for Ivan Denisovich, which oddly comforts me. The stories of perseverance and survival against all obstacles make me think that I can also persevere against my meaningless little problems. ;-)

Evgenia Semyonovna's son was Vasiliy Aksyonov, who was one of my professors in college. I talked to him a few times about the similarities between the Irish and the Russians, and always wished I could have met his mother. She sounded like the kind of woman I'd like to have known in person.

On a slightly related tangent, have you read Fania Fenelon's memoir?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I have never heard of Fania Fenelon's memoir. :)

I hope you're keeping well.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

She was a French woman deported to Auschwitz, who ended up in the orchestra there. "Playing for Time" was the English translation of her book, and it was made into a television movie starring Vanessa Redgrave as Fania -- a bit against type and certainly not matching reality, as Fania was a tiny woman. She died in France back in 1987 or so. The book was much better than the movie, but Vanessa Redgrave did her usual fabulous job in the role of an Auschwitz survivor.

I am doing better, although sleep is sometimes elusive. I'm not angry, although I am bewildered, which is a far healthier state of being. I don't mind being confused, as long as I have A Plan, and I do. It might not be the best plan, and it might not go according to Plan, but I haz one.

I don't think I'd be in as good shape if my friends hadn't immediately poured out their support, so thank you once again for being there in those dark hours. Yes, you.

All right, enough maudlin maunderings from me. Off to murder a cuppa.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

That sounds incredibly interesting. Although having visited Auschwitz, I'm not sure I'm capable of reading about it anymore without weeping fits.

I'm glad you're doing better. You have my wholehearted support, you know.