In 2006, BBC released a report based on former Soviet records, including "statements" allegedly written by Rawicz himself, showing that Rawicz had been released as part of the 1942 general amnesty of Poles in the USSR and subsequently transported across the Caspian Sea to a refugee camp in Iran and that his escape to India never occurred. In a ghost-written book called The Long Walk, he claimed that in 1941 he and six others had escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp and walked over 6,500 km (4,000 mi) south, through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas to finally reach British India in the winter of 1942. Thanks to all who suggested I read it.Slavomir Rawicz ( Sławomir Rawicz) was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the Soviets after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. If you are ever having a difficult day, feel like giving up hope, or merely view the things ahead of you as “a challenge”, pick up this book, open to any page, read 10 pages, and be humbled (and re-calibrated). The entire journey – most of it on foot – is over 4,000 miles from Moscow to India. The second half of the book is the incredible story of their journey south from northern Siberia, across Russia, through Mongolia, across the Gobi Dessert, over the mountains of Tibet, and finally into India. My description couldn’t do justice to this journey – Rawicz’s description is excruciatingly magnificent. Rawicz and six of his fellow prisoners split one night.
This kind of stuff goes on for a while and about 100 pages in, Rawicz starts plotting his escape. Upon arrival, not surprisingly, the first task for the new prisoners – in the midst of a hideous Siberian winter – is to build their own shelter.
Rawicz describes – in horrifying detail – the deportation to the labor camp.
Of course all of this is bogus as he’s merely Polish and has done nothing wrong, but he is stubborn and – rather than admit false guilt (and surely be executed), he hangs in there for a year of abuse and is sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. Rawicz tells the story of his arrest, interrogation, trial, and sentencing for espionage in Russia in 1939. Several people recommended it to me and it was simply awesome. Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk has replaced James Frey’s books as the best book of the year.
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