A classic adventure story, a tale of endurance and survival, The Long Walk is the story of a Polish officer who escaped from a Siberian Gulag and walked to India.

Whilst doing research for this review, I discovered that another man claimed that Rawicz had stolen his story. Witold Glinski says that the events in The Long Walk actually happened to him. Glinski claims Rawicz read an account of his voyage in the Polish embassy in London, and based the book on that recollection. In retrospect, this explains the curious character of the book. The book is incredible, but too incredible to be fake. There is just something about the book that rings true. But nonetheless, the book has a dreamy character, with strange bits that probably are the result of Rawicz making things up that he didn't really know. Reading Glinski's account makes much more sense of the things that happened, the flow is better, and nothing seems out of place.

Accusations had been leveled against Rawicz from the moment the book was published, but the BBC discovered evidence that Rawicz was in fact serving with the Polish Army after being released from the gulag during the time the events in the book occurred.

Despite all that, I liked this book. Given that it does seem to be based upon true events, it is still worth a read, even if it wasn't Rawicz who actually walked to India. There are a couple interesting things in the book that I noted. One thing that came to mind only because I am reading The Science of Conjecture by James Franklin, is the Soviets had a strange insistence upon obtaining confessions. Rawicz/Glinsky spent several months in the Lubyanka prison while the NKVD was attempting to obtain his confession. In retrospect, this seems strange. Why bother? There was not really any danger of a popular uprising in the WWII period, they did not need to obtain confessions.

However, going back to the 10th century in Continental Law, there was a preference for confession above all other forms of proof in legal cases, due to the difficulty of interpretation of other kinds of evidence. Confession was felt to be unambiguous in ways that other kinds of testimony were not, primarily for religious reasons. This struck me as funny, in a perverse way, that the Soviets insisted on confessions for their show trials when the ultimate reason for doing so traces back to the Torah.

This book is also excellent for the sense of the vast emptiness it effectively creates. Central Asia has a whole lotta nothing going on, and this book will make that impression stick in your mind. ( )

18 February 2001
The Long Walk
Slavomir Rawicz

The long walk of the title was from a soviet labor camp in northern Siberia, south across Asia to India. The author was a Lieutenant of Polish Calvary, who was arrested by the Russians after the partition of Poland, convicted and sent to Siberia. He was tortured both in Kursk and in Moscow's Lubyanka prison, and refused to sign a confession, and so was sentanced to 25 years labor in 1940. He survived the march in the cold north from the Trans-Siberian railway, past Lake Baikal, to a point north of the Lena River, to a timber camp in the great Siberian forest. He determined to escape, and reasoned that travel towards the South was less risky for recapture. He and seven companions, including an American engineer, escaped in a snowstorm, walked for two days without pause in the snow. They then traveled for more than a year across Mongolia, the Gobi, and the Himalayas. Four of the seven reached India. The author describes seeing some creatures in the Himalayas that might have been the abominable snowmen.

From the afterword, it seems that this book was somewhat of a phenomenon in the 1950's, when it was first published, after the author settled in England. He received correspondance from all over the world about it, but curiously never again saw his companions on the trek after separating from them in India. ( )

http://thebookwormslibrary.com/?p=93 ( )

Slavomir Rawicz was a Polish cavalry officer in World War II. He came home on leave and found himself arrested by the Russians for the crime of, well, being Polish. He was kept in prison, but refused to confess. After a few months, he was tricked into signing a confession and shipped off to Siberia for 25 years hard labor. After a horrible trek up into the northern wilderness, he finds himself in a Siberian work camp.

He decides he's not about to spend 25 years there, and makes plans to escape. He enlists six other men, a Latvian, an American, other Poles, and they sneak out in the night. Their escape plan will take them through Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, up and down the Himalayas, and through India.

It's an incredible story. I couldn't put it down once I got started. Sometimes there were gaps in the story, but it was absolutely gripping. Really worth reading. ( )

I really, really wanted this to be a true story, but it is a complete fake (search on Wikipedia). I read it several times at an impressionable age. There were so many things that seemed just fantastic and yet almost possible nut turned out to actually be impossible.
If this was a true story then it would be a 4 1/2 stars. As a work of fiction I give it three stars. I suggest that anyone interested in this story read Heinrich Harrer instead. ( )