Grab Long Walk: The True Story Of A Trek To Freedom Prepared By Slavomir Rawicz Paperback

Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz, purports to be the true story of an heroic flight to freedom, He claims to have been a Polish officer grabbed by the Russians in, imprisoned and marched to "camp" in Siberia, From there he and six companions escape, with the help of the commandants wife, THey begin a year long trek south, past Lake Baikal, through Mongolia, across the Gobi, over Tibet and to India and freedom, Hurray! What a triumph of the human spirit, The book had the taint of improbability all along,especially the part about observing a Yeti couple! Subsequent investigation shows the book is a fraud, None of the events can be substantiated, He claims to have convalesced in a British military hospital in India for a month, but there is no such record, He claims to have trained with the Polish contingent of the RAF, but there is no record of that, Russian records show no campthey show Rawicz was a prisoner of war, but was pardoned inand sent to a refugee camp in Iran, So there you go. I'm not going to get all wrapped up in whether or not this account is true as the book claims, It's a remarkable story regardless, much like the book I just

read, sitelinkDas Boot: The Boat, was a remarkable story and may have some kernels of truth from the author's real life.
The story itself is good and empowering, and that's all that really matters to me,



That's a lot of walking, even for fictional characters, Amazing true account of courage and determination,.stars.
This group of men escaped from a Siberian prison camp inand spent a year making their way to safety in India, They crossed very harsh terrain including the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas, Sadly, not all of them survived the journey,
Most interesting were the locals they met along the way, especially the Mongolians and Tibetans,
Very well edited and not too long, Reads like a novel. When this novel was first published init created a sensation, It claimed to be a memoir of a man, who with seven others, had escaped from a Siberian prison work camp inand managed to walk all the way to British India.
The story was eagerly consumed by the cold war era public who were enamored by the tale of an escape from the evil empire of the Soviet Union, It was an incredible story of endurance that required walking across the Gobi Desert and over the Himalayan Mountains,

Research of Soviet records since the cold war has revealed that while it is true that the author had been a prisoner in Siberia in the earlys, he did not escape in the manner described in this book.
Instead he was released as part of ageneral amnesty and subsequently transported across the Caspian Sea to a refugee camp in Iran, He did end up living in Britain and probably passed through India on the way there,

I'm surprised that anybody believed the story in the first place because of its many technical flaws, If the author had called the book a novel I would criticize for being unrealistic and in need of additional research into means of survival in the desert and mountains.
Unfortunately, the author claimed it to be a true memoir of his experiences, I say unfortunate because it clearly makes him to be a liar,

If there is any possibility of truth in the story it may be that Slavomir Rawics stole the story from another person who actually walked such a journey.
I think it's possible that prisoners from Siberia managed to escape to India, but I'm quite confident that they didn't do it by walking across the Gobi without equipment and a map.
Their crossing of the Himalayas has similar problems, And the Long Walk's claim that they saw Abominable Snowman i, e. The Yeti establishes the fact beyond all doubt that the book is fiction, and fiction not very well done,

But the fact remains that the idea of escaping from Siberia to India is a heck of a story, Themovie "sitelinkThe Way Back" is based on this book, Maybe the movie is more realistic, but I've not seen the movie so I can't judge it, The movie's popularity caused the book to be republished and consequently brought to my attention,

You can read more about the controversy regarding the authenticity of the book at this sitelinkWikipedia article,

The following review from PageADay'sBook Lover's Calendar was how I first learned about the book:
BACK IN PRINT
Rawiczs memoir is one of the most extraordinary and harrowing you will ever read.
A young Polish officer in World War II, Rawicz was captured by Soviet forces and sent to a work camp in Siberia, Inhe and six fellow prisoners escaped and, with only an ax head and a makeshift knife, trekked thousands of miles through Siberian tundra, the Gobi desert, and over the Himalayas to freedom in Britishoccupied India.
The New York Times calls Rawicz “a poet with steel in his soul” and Sebastian Junger The Perfect Storm calls the book “one of the epic treks of the human race.
”
THE LONG WALK: THE TRUE STORY OF A TREK TO FREEDOM, by Slavomir RawiczThe Lyons Press,
The harrowing true tale of seven escaped Soviet prisoners who desperately marched out of Siberia through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India.

Perhaps Ive been missing references to this book and gulags for years, but now I see them everywhere, The night after I finished this book, I laughed uproariously to find this book and its movie being referenced in the new Muppets movie, I think I was the only person in the theater who got the joke when the actress that played Christina in the movie started doing ballet against scene cuts of Muppets treacherously traversing snowy mountains and hot deserts to get to Kermit the Frog in his Siberian gulag.
Or maybe Im the last person to have seen the movie and read the book and the pop culture aspect of it is old news,

I remember my International Relations professor referencing sitelinkAleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his writings about the Russian gulags Russian forced labor prison camps, but it was only a vague reference without much background.
Somehow I missed that Stalin began placing people in gulags inand had already imprisoned,million inmates in gulags by the beginning of World War II with numbers rising as high as,million inmates in thes, The majority of these camps were located in Siberia, And its the journey to and the escape from one of these Siberian gulags to India by way of the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas that is the subject of this book.


The history of this book is a convoluted one, The tale within the book occurs fromand was originally ghost written for the author in, A few years ago, it came out that it was impossible for this to have been the true story of the author since he was released from the gulag into a refugee camp in Iran rather than escaping to India in.
Another man, Witold Gliński, then claimed that the story was true, but that it had happened to him instead,

Regardless of what is true and what is not, its a fascinating story of survival and perseverance, The movie and book became instant favorites of mine, I think that, more than anything, I was amazed that the U, S. allied with Russia in World War II when Stalin was very much still reigning terror down upon those whom he saw as a threat to his rule and spread of communism.
It was a selfish alliance in some ways, but a wise alliance in others, But what was happening in Russia during World War II and afterward isnt depicted in movies and literature nearly as much as the horrors of Hitler, In toll of lives, Stalin was directly or indirectly responsible for far more than Hitler, Still, I suppose it could have been worse,

I watched the movie version of this book “The Way Back” first, and it left out the horrifying fact that a large part of the journey of Russias political prisoners to Siberia was done on foot.
Prisoners were chained together poorly dressed for the cold weather and made to walkmiles or more with only bread and water to sustain them, Many died along the way, One thing that struck me in the book was the authors observation that a decade in age made a huge difference in how well a man was able to endure and survive the journey and the work expected up them upon arrival.
I suppose that if youve already endured and survived amile trek, youre more apt to think that amile escape route from Siberia to India might not be impossible.


Once the prisoners escaped into the wilderness, I found it odd that they never found a way of carrying water with them, They could have hollowed out a tree trunk, used the bladder of the deer they killed, rummaged in the garbage of villages they passed for some sort of vessel, etc.
But they never had more than a mug between them for cooking or carrying water, At the point that they realized they were wandering into a desert, surely they would have realized their need for a way to carry water, Its amazing how often they went forward on their journey with simply the hope that theyd eventually encounter food and water if they kept going, I suppose that you do what you have to do, Im still amazed that more of them didnt die in the desert with only the occasional mud puddle and snake to sustain them, And Im amazed, too, that they managed to get to India without a map, Im thinking about how difficult it would be for me to attempt a similarly lengthy journey from here to Alaska on foot with nothing but a general directional idea and no map.
Christopher McCandless version of that journey was harsh enough in sitelinkInto the Wild, Luckily, poor peasants are far more accepting of a ragamuffin group of travelers than your average city dweller, If you saw a band of halfstarved dirty travelers walking down your street, you'd be more likely to lock your doors than kill a lamb to feed them,

Whether this story was completely, partially, or not at nonfiction, it still stands as a grand tale, I highly recommend it to those interested in history and tales of survival, .