Janusz Bardach, 83; Plastic Surgeon, Expert on Cleft Lips, Palates

Dr. Janusz Bardach, 83, a Polish immigrant who spent five years in a Siberian prison camp and later became one of the most respected plastic surgeons in the world, died Aug. 16 in Iowa City, Iowa, of pancreatic cancer.

He pioneered the Bardach palatoplasty, a surgical technique for repairing cleft lips and palates that reduced the number of required surgeries, improved speech and reduced scarring.

Bardach retired in 1991, after leading the facial and reconstructive surgery program at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. He wrote more than 200 scientific articles and 12 books on plastic surgery.

But he also wrote, with the help of Kathleen Gleeson, a moving account of his Soviet imprisonment, “Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag,” published by UC Press in 1998. Bardach was sentenced to hard labor after an accident in which, as a Soviet Army draftee, he was driving a tank when it turned onto its side.

Bardach was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and moved to Poland as an infant. When Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland, he again came under Soviet rule. After his release from the gulag, he practiced plastic surgery in Poland until he moved to the U.S. in 1972.