With no map or compass but only an ax head, a homemade knife, and a week's supply of food, the compatriots spent a year making their way on foot to British India, through four thousand miles of the most forbidding terrain on earth. They braved the Himalayas, the desolate Siberian tundra, icy rivers, and the great Gobi Desert, always a hair's breadth from death. Finally arriving, Rawicz reenlisted in the Polish army to fight the Germans.

Slavomir Rawicz is unjustly imprisoned by the Communist Russians early in World War II. He is confined to a cell so small that he literally cannot sit, but must sleep by collapsing with his knees against the wall and his feet steeped in his own waste. He is later transported to Siberia by train, and then marched through the cold countryside to a Soviet Gulag, witnessing the death by exposure and exhaustion of other unfortunate captives along the way. In the prison camp he is set in forced labor, kept in horrendous conditions, over-worked, and underfed.

Near the end of his rope, Rawicz and a handful of companions orchestrate a daring and desperate escape, and then proceed to run for their lives, on foot, toward freedom in India--4,000 miles away. Then the fun begins. They must conquer the frozen Siberian tundra, the Gobi desert, the Himalayan Mountains, starvation, the Soviets, and their own inner demons.

Slavomir's ordeal overshadows every other survival tale I've every read, including Admiral Scott's Polar expedition and Krakauer's Everest disaster. This is up there with the Donner Expedition in terms of grim conditions and the indomitable human spirit. Trust me. If you've got a teenager who's complaining because they think they have it rough, let 'em read this one. --Christopher Bonn Jonnes, author of Wake Up Dead.


Great Story of Endurance and Quest for Liberty   May 12, 2003
 89 out of 97 found this review helpful

The story in a nutshell: A Polish Army officer is captured by the Soviets after they have joined Hitler in dismembering his country. Rawicz (the officer) is tortured in the Soviet prison system and sent to the Gulags. Faced with misery in Siberia and probable death, he and a band of others escape and undertake a two thousand-mile long journey from the snows of Siberia through Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and across the Himalayas toward British India and freedom.

This is a great story. The author describes the mindless torture under the Soviet system in a manner that should persuade any reader of the evil of totalitarianism. The description of his train journey, hundred-mile winter hike through a Siberian winter to his gulag and life in the camp is fascinating. His will to survive amidst degradation, the elements and overwhelming odds are a testament to the human thirst for freedom and liberty.

As other reviewers have stated, there are some parts of the book that invite skepticism. His befriending by the camp commandant's wife seems as improbable as it is crucial to his ability to escape. The escapees journey across the Gobi Desert where his group went for many days without water beyond what I understood a person could tolerate. Without any climbing tools, his party went across the Himalayas to India -- a feat that seems fantastic. Also his brief description of spotting what could only be described as the elusive Yetti in the Himalayas stretches credibility (unless it does actually exist).

That being said, this story is exhilarating and I found it believable and enthralling. It is a wonderful adventure story and describes the limits of what the human spirit and mind can endure to survive in freedom. This book has been around for almost fifty years and was given wide play when first introduced. I'm going to assume the lack of anything debunking this widely told tale (or, anything that I could find) argues for the author's veracity -- certainly that frame of mind allows one to enjoy a stirring story.


A great "story," but unfortunately it's only a story   December 18, 2005
 57 out of 72 found this review helpful

In The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz tells the story of his escape from a WWII Soviet prison camp and his long walk to freedom. The story is gripping, even painful at times; but it has one major problem: it is probably not a true story.

This book's genesis came when a British reporter in the 1950s was doing research on Yeti sightings and came across Slavomir Rawicz, who claimed to have seen an unidentified "monster" after escaping from a Soviet prison camp. After meeting with Rawicz, the reporter realized that the story of Rawicz's escape is a much better story and helps Rawicz write the story of the escape and long trek.

Although the impetus of the story should raise some doubts with the reader (a Yeti sighting), because the book is billed as "the True Story of a Trek to Freedom," the reader quickly becomes engrossed in the story. Rawicz was a Polish Army officer captured by the Germans at the beginning of World War II and sent to a work camp deep in Siberia. Rawicz and some companions engineered an escape, and for the next year they traveled southward trying to escape Soviet Russia. At times they were at the verge of starvation, and the reader cannot help but feel real pain when Rawicz tells of the companions who died along the trip, but they persevered through the cold of Siberia and the heat of the Gobi desert before finally meeting some British soldiers in India.

It's a real triumph - but, it's likely not true. As Anne Applebaum points out in her Pulitzer Prize-winning history Gulag, most experts who have examined this story find it "unconvincing." No one has been able to locate any records from Rawicz's time as a prisoner, and one of the leading Russian historians of the Gulag carried on correspondence with Rawicz and does not believe his story. [EDIT: In October 2006, the BBC found some records that show that Rawicz was a prisoner in the Gulag but was released by the NKVD and sent to a refugee camp in Iran. He did not escape and flee with a small band of ex-prisoners through the frozen wastelands of Siberia or through the Gobi Desert en route to India.] The fact that many want to believe this inspiring story shouldn't overcome the fact that experts who have corresponded with the author, who have searched for his records, and who have seriously considered the details of his escape, do not believe this story.

This book's power lies in the premise that it's a true story; but if you take that away, it's just a hoax that has been played on generations of readers.


A Patent Fabrication   May 27, 2003
 31 out of 35 found this review helpful

I am an avid outdoorsman with experience in long distance hiking and backcountry winter travel. I love TRUE survival stories, but this one is not only false but obviously so. It is simply not possible to bushwhack 20-30 miles a day through deep snow with almost no food and no water as recounted in the Northern part of the trek - and to make that distance in actual forward progress with no map.

He also claims to have gone 8 and then 12 days with no water in the Gobi desert in the heat of summer while walking miles and miles each day. This also is impossible as survival without water in these conditions is limited to a very few days at best.

It's also full of all kinds of "little" howlers like the idea that when they got to the Gobi desert between the eight of them they only pot or pan they had was a single mug they'd taken from the prison camp. They hadn't even managed to scavenge a tin can. Right.

I love the American, "Mr. Smith", who doesn't reveal his first name throughout the entire epic. Maybe he was really Agent K. Or was it J.

In the end, it's ever so convienient that he loses track of all of his fellow survivors so "coincidentally" there is no one to corroborate this absurd story.

I've really only scratched the surface.

If you want some incredible survival stories you can believe try "Endurance" - an account of the Shackleton Expedition, Touching The Void by Joe Simpson, or Adrift by Steven Callahan.

=Steve Dunn=


nobody should believe this book   October 22, 2004
 30 out of 47 found this review helpful

This book is a fake. Its been known to be a fake for decades
but for unknown reasons many people would rather read a fake
book about the USSR than read real accounts of people who
suffered horribly under stalinism and communism.

Why is it a fake? There is nothing in it (including the
identity of the author) that can be proved out.

No such person as "Slavomir Rawicz" was an officer in the
polish army or the polish army in exile. No such person
appears in the soviet records and neither does the camp
he claims he was at. There is no evidence of his ever having
been in India. It would be different if some parts of his
story at least could be confirmed by others, but not one
single part of it can be proved by anything but his word to
have happened.

Those who promote this FRAUD are doing a terrible injustice
to the real victims of the soviet system. Why anyone would
choose to ignore true stories of poles and others supported
by facts in favor of a ghost written book full of nonsense up
to and including an encounter with a snowman is beyond reason.

If you want to learn about polish officers in the USSR, a
fact to start with is that tens of thousands of them were
executed and thrown into mass graves. Others were put into
real camps in the gulag and then found there way out either
by escape or through the releases that were arranged by
strong men who did not forget them and forced the soviet union
to release many of the remaining survivors.

Those stories are real and the brave actions of those involved
is real. Those who promote this work of fiction and fraud
are doing a disgrace to the memory of a great many victims
of stalinism.