Review - The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz

[maschinengewehr42]

First, it should be noted that whilst the events in this memoir all take place during WW2, this is not a book about the war, but rather of escape and survival in some of the harshest places on the planet. It is a tale of an epic journey to freedom from a Soviet gulag.

The author was a proud Polish cavalry officer who fought the Germans in the west in 1939, but was arrested by the NKVD on return to his home in the Soviet occupied area. Brutally interrogated in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, he was eventually sentenced to 25 years hard labour on completely fabricated charges of spying. He and hundreds more Polish prisoners were marched for 3 months to Siberia, in the depths of winter, with no shelter and inadequate clothing, each man chained to the next. Many died en route.

In the camp near Irkutsk the food was so poor, and conditions so hard, that he saw little chance of surviving the full 25 years of his sentence, so resolved to escape. He assembled a group of 6 companions, including four other Polish soldiers, a Lithuanian, and an American engineer arrested for spying when supervising the construction of the Moscow metro. They all had little to lose, and planned their route from memory, without maps of any sort. Materials were incredibly scarce in the camps, but they obtained a treasured small axe-head, and beat out a knife blade from a piece of broken saw blade. They sewed moccasains and winter clothing from furs of animals shot by the guards for the pot, and hoarded a meager supply of dried bread and barley.

Crawling under the wire at night, in the depths of the Siberian winter, they made a successful break, and began an odyssey through Asia, from Siberia into Mongolia, across the Gobi desert, into Tibet, and finally into the British colony of India, and freedom. During their journey they lived off the land, catching fish, deer, snakes, and anything edible that they could find, meeting some generous hosts in populated areas, but suffering extreme hunger in the wastelands. Their lack of any kind of water container made the desert stages deadly for some. They never used a road, there being none where they travelled, and slept in the open, crossing mountain ranges, rivers, and gorges. Seven companions escaped from Camp 303, meeting one more shortly after their escape, and of those eight, just four survived the trek to reach safety. That they did it with little knowledge of the areas, no maps, no compass, and save for a knife and axe of metal, stone-age clothing and footwear of home-sewn animal skins, makes their achievement a triumph of the human will to live over utter despair and hopelessness.

The writing style is crisp and easily readable. It's not translated from Polish, but completely rewritten in English by the original author, who first published it in 1956. It was only published in English in 1999. I read it all the way through in two evenings. There are only a few memoirs I couldn't put down like that. This is one of the best I've ever read. A little-known gem.

[Benoit Douville]

That's really an interesting account by this Polish Officer, I will put it on my list. If you are interested by this kind of litterature I would also highly suggest to you to read ''In The Shadow of Katyn'' by Polish Officer Stanislaw Swianiewicz. He was captured by the Soviets in September 1939. In April 1940 he was brought to the vicinity of the Katyn Forest where the execution of Polish officers was taking place. Before the war, Stanislaw was researching the economies of totalitarian countries and his expert knowledge of the German economy caught the interest of his Soviet captors. He was recalled from the Katyn Forest to Moscow where he was interrogated and sentenced to forced labour in the GULAG. His survival of death from starvation and exhaustion and his subsequent escape from the claws of the NKVD make for fascinating reading.

Regards

[maschinengewehr42]

That also sounds an interesting one. It's on my list too now. Thanks.

[hucks216]

There is also a similar book called As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me by Josef M Bauer which tells the story of Clemens Forell, a Fallschirmjager who escaped from a Russian POW camp after the war.

[Richard Hargreaves]

Bauer's book is what I'd call 'faction' - fiction based on fact (interestingly there's a similar episode described in the first series of Heimat). Bauer was a leading mountaineer/gebirgsjäger/writer/novellist who wrote a good account of the assault on Mount Elbrus in the 60s or 70s.

[Benoit Douville]

Richard,

Where can I found that account about the assault on Mt-Elbrus?

Regards

[B Hellqvist]

The veracity of "The Long Walk" is put in question in this BBC article.

[Richard Hargreaves]

Richard,

Where can I found that account about the assault on Mt-Elbrus?

Regards

Only in German, Benoit. It's called Unternehmen Elbrus (Operation Elbrus). You can pick up a paperback for a few Euros quite easily.