Janusz Bardach

Janusz Bardach (July 28, 1919 in Odessa – August 16, 2002 in Iowa City)[1] was a gulag inmate, author, and noted plastic surgeon.

Sarcastic political remarks in training and an accident during a scouting mission that resulted in an overturned tank caused him to be court-martialed for counter-revolutionary activity.

Bardach lied and claimed to be one, drawing on medical knowledge gleaned from his father, and was made a feldsher, or doctor's assistant, in the camps.

Using this incident and his previous record as a doctor's assistant, Bardach talked his way into working in the camp hospitals, where he continued to pretend to be a medical student.

Anti-Semitism and Communism drove him to escape Poland, and in 1972 he joined the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Iowa and later became chairman of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery of the Head and Neck.