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Witold Bardach (July 26, 1925 – May 10, 2016), better known as Gene Gutowski, was a Polish-American film producer who produced many of Roman Polanski's films, including Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-Sac (1966), The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and The Pianist (2002). The New York Times Repulsion: The Criterion Collection, Slant Magazine (2009) Od Holocastu do Hollywood, Gazeta Wyborcza (2004) Spieprzaj do Hollywood! Gazeta Wyborcza (2009)
Bardach escaped to Warsaw, where he first worked for a photographer and later as an employee of the Junkers factory at Okęcie Airport (Warsaw Chopin Airport), secretly removing Luftwaffe radio transmitters for delivery to the underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa). In order to escape from the Gestapo at 18 years old, he took on the name Eugene (Eugeniusz) Gutowski and left Warsaw for Riga, Latvia, where he became the head of a construction company working for the Organization Todt. At the end of 1944, he was evacuated to Germany via the Baltic Sea, Gdańsk, and Silesia to Judenburg in today's Austria. In May 1945, again escaping from the advancing Soviet army, Gutowski joined the Counterintelligence Corps of the United States Army. He worked as a special agent until March 1947, when he married State Department employee Zillah Rhoades, and moved with her to New York City. They had two children: Andrew Gutowski, born in New York on July 17, 1951, and Alexander Waugh Gutowski, born in Charlottesville, Virginia on November 7, 1952. Alexander Waugh Gutowski had one child, Jordan Waugh, born in Saskatchewan, Canada on September 17, 1979.
In 2004, his Polish autobiography Od Holocaustu do Hollywood ( From Holocaust to Hollywood), was published. An English-language edition under the title With Balls and Chutzpah: A Story of Survival was issued in the U.S. in 2011. In 2014, his son, the Hollywood-based filmmaker/producer Adam Bardach, made a documentary biopic "Dancing Before the Enemy: How a Teenage Boy Fooled the Nazis and Lived (Mój tata Gene Gutowski)".
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