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‘I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves’
Slavomir Rawicz
Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a gulag.
After a three-month journey in the dead of winter to Siberia, life in a Soviet labour camp meant enduring hunger, extreme cold, untreated wounds and illnesses and facing the daily risk of arbitrary execution. Realising that to remain meant almost certain death, Rawicz, along with six companions, escaped. In June 1941, they crossed the trans-Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and freedom in British India nine months later, in March 1942, having travelled over four thousand miles on foot through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert, Tibet and the Himalayas.
First published in 1956, this is one of the greatest true stories of escape, adventure and survival against all odds.
In 2010, a film, The Way Back, based on the book, directed by six-time Academy Award-nominee Peter Weir (Master and Commander, The Truman Show, and The Dead Poets Society) was released. It starred Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess and Ed Harris.
Slavomir Rawicz
Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a gulag.
After a three-month journey in the dead of winter to Siberia, life in a Soviet labour camp meant enduring hunger, extreme cold, untreated wounds and illnesses and facing the daily risk of arbitrary execution. Realising that to remain meant almost certain death, Rawicz, along with six companions, escaped. In June 1941, they crossed the trans-Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and freedom in British India nine months later, in March 1942, having travelled over four thousand miles on foot through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert, Tibet and the Himalayas.
First published in 1956, this is one of the greatest true stories of escape, adventure and survival against all odds.
In 2010, a film, The Way Back, based on the book, directed by six-time Academy Award-nominee Peter Weir (Master and Commander, The Truman Show, and The Dead Poets Society) was released. It starred Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess and Ed Harris.
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Reviews
Essentially it comes down to some sort of inner tenacity and that is what is so gripping about the book because you know that this is actually about all of us. It's not just some Polish bloke who wanted to get home. It's about how we all struggle on every day. Somehow or other we find a reason to keep on going and it's the same here but on an epic scale.
The ultimate human endurance story . . . told with clarity, vivid description, and a good dash of romance and humor.
Heroism is not the domain of the powerful; it is the domain of people whose only other alternative is to give up and die . . . [The Long Walk] must be read - and reread, and passed along to friends.
The Long Walk is a book that I absolutely could not put down and one that I will never forget.
One of the most amazing, heroic stories of this or any other time.
Positively Homeric.
A book filled with the spirit of human dignity and the courage of men seeking freedom.
One of the epic treks of the human race. Shackleton, Franklin, Amundsen . . . History is filled with people who have crossed immense distances and survived despite horrific odds. None of them, however, has achieved the extraordinary feat Rawicz has recorded. He and his companions crossed an entire continent - the Siberian Arctic, the Gobi Desert and then the Himalayas - with nothing but an axe, a knife and a week's worth of food . . . His account is so filled with despair and suffering it is almost unreadable. But it must be read - and re-read.
A poet with steel in his soul.