I read Slavomir Rawicz's (think that's the right spelling--I'm doing this from memory) The Long Walk when I was perhaps 15. It seems to have been in print ever since--i.e., 40 years. I have noticed at least one new edition in bookstores in recent years.

The story, for the uninitiated, is a purportedly true account of a Pole's escape, along with some other men, from a Siberian labor camp during World War II and his trek southward, something around 2,000 miles, I think, across Siberian wastes, the Gobi desert, western China, the Himalaya Mountains, and into India. The journey took many months, perhaps a year. Certainly amazing, but not necessarily incredible.

I have no idea if anyone has ever looked into whether the story has ever been, or ever could be, substantiated. I recall that Rawicz claims at the end of the book that he and his companions in the journey separated in India and that he has completely lost touch with them. I seem to remember the British publisher's introduction to the first edition, some time in the 1950's, saying something to the effect that no supporting witnesses to Rawicz's story had come forward, but that it is still a credible one.

I did not question the veracity of the story when I originally read it, but in the years since I have often questioned its plausibility. Some parts of the story--Rawicz's interrogation by the NKVD and his journey to the Siberian camp--seem very consistent with other memoirs of similar experiences, and he quite possibly had those experiences. But some other things in the story simply seem too fanciful:

• Rawicz says that the group escape, of about six prisoners, was an idea conceived and enabled by the camp commandant's wife. A little too cinematic.
  
• Rawicz says that he and his fellow escapees secretly saved up dry bread to carry as a food supply in their trek through complete wilderness. That accords ill with the kind of rations known to have been supplied in those camps, and with the ubiquity of theft and betrayal in them, as described in many memoirs, e.g., Kolyma Tales. In any event, they would have had to carry huge sackfuls of bread to support six men for very long--enough to make escape itself impractical.
  
• I have considerable personal experience in the Alaskan bush. To walk hundreds of miles across that kind of brutally punishing country--the Russian Far East is similar--without warm and durable clothing, a significant supply of food, and tools or weapons for obtaining more--would be impossible for a fit man, let alone convicts who have been enduring the rigors of a concentration camp. Rawicz mentions getting wild food only once that I recall--when the group finds a "stag" with its antlers entangled in brush so that it cannot escape. Conceivable, but not likely. He describes their getting lost in a blizzard, I believe, but I can't recall any close brushes with hypothermia. I own the highest quality outdoor clothing, and I'm also quite careful, but I have been dangerously hypothermic twice, both times from breaking through ice. I can't recall if he has any such episode, but I can assure you it would have been impossible to cross hundreds of miles of subarctic wilderness in winter and not encounter both open water and treacherous ice.
  
• They seem to meet almost no one on their journey--except for a young woman who decides to join their trek! I vaguely recall there is some rather melodramatic explanation like she doesn't want to be forced to marry a man she doesn't love (right--so it would make perfect sense to plunge off into the wilderness with six ragged wild men you don't know at all).
• They go without water for an impossibly long time in the Gobi--something like twelve days. The last survivor of the Lady Be Good crew lasted five days without water, and experts found that unusually long. Yet in Rawciz's story, only the girl dies of dehydration.
  
• And in the Himalaya's--Rawicz sees a yeti! (Is "yeti" singular or plural?) Anyway, he not only sees one--he comes face to face with one, and as I recall, he describes its features and the look in its eyes as distinctly human-like. At the time he wrote, scientists still considered the yeti to be at least a possibility. But the beast has long since been dismissed as fanciful--so how could Rawicz have seen one? (Of course, nobody else in his party saw it.)
  

Well, there's more, but you get the idea. One or two implausible claims don't necessarily torpedo credibility--bizarre things do happen--but when you string a enough implausibilities together not even a suspension bridge will suspend your disbelief.

I'm curious if anyone here has ever read the book, and if so what you thought.

Not bad recount from memorey, Fritz.

There's something interesting in all this reality/ vs. fiction controversy. Upon first reading Eskin's piece, I was filled with all the appropriate disgust. I'm still disgusted with the deceptions of MISHA, but it seems like previous generations had more tolerance for falsified stories-- so long as they were good. I'm thinking of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and the dismantaling of his tale of addictive woes done by Smoking Gun.

The poor slob was forced to go back to Oprah and wax all emotional about "his reality."

On one hand, I was glad Frey had to fess up. As a successful participator in 12 step recovery, I witnessed first-hand the deep suspicion planted in the minds of some folks who were already dubious about 12 step recovery and who were only looking for an excuse to exit. Frey's chicanery-in-print gave some folks that excuse (at least momentarilly.)

On the other hand, I marveled at how inconsistently applied are the reading public's standards of truth in print. On that other hand, I felt bad for the Frey. He got nailed, though lots of writers don't.

how did world war II impact american society?

and why was there a cold war and what were its consequences?

Wikipedia has an entry which casts doubt on the story based on Soviet records from 2006:

"Sławomir Rawicz (September 1, 1915 – April 5, 2004) was a Polish soldier who was arrested by Soviet occupation troops after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. In a book he participated in writing, he claimed that he and six others escaped and walked over 6,500 km (4,000 miles) south, through the Gobi desert, and over the Himalayas to India. In 2006, records from the former Soviet Union including some written by Rawicz himself were discovered that show that Rawicz was pardoned as a part of a general release of Poles from the Soviet Union in 1942 and was afterward transported across the Caspian Sea to a refugee camp in Iran [1]."

The Wikipedia entry cites a BBC News article as well.

Googling "Slawomir Rawicz" turns up other discussions on the truthfulness of the story. It's credibility has apparently been questioned for a long time.

Since my post about Rawicz, I've read Norman Davies' No Simple Victory, an idiosyncratic but very thought-provoking history of WWII in Europe. Davies mentions Rawicz:

Slavomir Rawicz (1915-2004) was a Polish cavalry officer who fought the Germans in 1939 but was captured by the Soviets and sentenced to twenty-five years' hard labour in a camp in eastern Siberia. He escaped with a small group of fellow inmates, and over twelve months in 1941-42, he walked the 6,500 km to Calcutta--crossing the Gobi Desert, Tibet and the Himalayas on the way. He later served with the British Eighth Army in Palestine. Several reviewers denounced his autobiographical book The Long Walk (1956) as a work of fiction, not to say fraud. But it wasn't, despite obvious embellishments. British officials in India and Afghanistan reported other similar Polish arrivals. (page 273)

Davies is a highly respected British specialist in eastern European, especially Polish, history, and his knowledge of the war is encyclopedic. His view can't be dismissed lightly. But I wish he had stated the grounds on which he believes Rawciz. (His only citation is to The Long Walk itself.) Since Rawicz lived in England from after the war until his death, it's possible that Davies and Rawicz met, and that Davies' conviction is based on a personal interview (or, conceivably, influenced by contacts with members of Rawicz's family). Since No Simple Victory is expressly an interpretive essay, not a work of narrative history, its scholarly apparatus is quite light; Davies wouldn't necessarily have disclosed such an interview in his notes.

Another factor might be Davies' emphatic belief that Soviet statements and records cannot be trusted where the Poles captured in 1939 are concerned. The Russians murdered 25,000 Polish officers and then lied about it, both crudely and creatively, until 1990. (Stalin told Churchill that all those Polish prisoners must have "escaped to China.") Their record of Rawicz's alleged release is not necessarily dispositive. Soviets were known to manufacture phony records in other embarrassing cases, e.g., in the 1960's or 1970's, after decades of denying they knew anything, they produced what they claimed was a copy of a record that Raoul Wallenberg died of a "heart attack" soon after Soviet troops arrested him in Hungary. Yeah, sure.

Finally, reading No Simple Victory you form an impression that such bizarre events (as walking from Siberia to India) were more frequent in those horrible years than is widely known. When you put several hundred million people into the blender and turn it on to whip, expected patterns of behavior get shattered and there are more chances for these improbable outliers to occur.

I'm not saying I now believe Rawicz. My initial skepticism, when I read the book many years ago, was based on my judgment of the intrinsic implausibility of a number of its claims, and that has not changed. Even Davies acknowledges that the story contains "embellishments"-- including, I assume, the face-to-face meeting with the yeti! But if Rawciz had really accomplished the basic exploit Davies credits him with--escaped and walked to India--what need would there have been for embellishment?

first of all, slavomir (that is how the book spells it)never claims anything like a face-to-face yeti encounter. they were "twelve feet or so below us and about a hundred yards away," (rawicz 228). he mentions nothing of human-like eyes but does remark their height, shoulder etc. one reason his story could be truth (or at least what he honestly believes to be truth) is why the heck include a yeti? it's people's first objection to its validity! if you are telling a lie you avoid implausabilities when possible. sure, it was thought a bit more of a possibility back in the day but still, why include it? some believe 9/11 was an inside job, but if i'm writing a novel about my years as a white house maid i am not claiming to have seen bush talk to one of the high-jackers! the human body is certainly capable of unimaginable feats like slav's but the human mind is capable of much inaccuracy as well. if slav survived half what he claimed it is amazing he didn't collapse into a sofa babbling about water and food and dead friends. it is easy to forget and easier to lie to oneself. I think the tale is mostly factual but also skewed. maybe he did lie about the yeti but he did just because he wanted to tell the rest of his story, to feel important, and a yeti is what the reporters wanted. maybe, malnourished and dehydrated, they saw something they thought was a yeti, only later to find it was a goat, and years later slav convinced himself it was a yeti after all. as you can tell, i am attempting to show there is reasonable doubt in favor of slav, or at least of his good faith, even in regard to the yeti. remember, science has a way of being a tad too sure of itself. heck, at one point the best and brightest thought the earth the center of the universe. all i'm say is new facts appear. reasonable doubt. that's all.

his entire group saw the yetis (plural form of yeti?) and Zaro even tried to scare them off (dancing, yelling, ice clods) but failed.

I did read The Long Walk. It was a page turner. I too accepted it as true. But there seemed to be a contradiction between the map of the circumvention of Lake Baikal and the verbal description it. One seemed to be clockwise, the other counter clockwise, it seemed to me. I also wondered why the route led across the Gobi. Maybe the group could have gotten better advice from the locals. And was there really that much pressure to keep going, after they had put alot of distance between themselves and the prison camp.

I read this book three times. I also collect books and maps about Central Asia, West China and Tibet. I am aware of the controversy and factual issues stirred by this book.

I have two thoughts:

First, the story is a gripping. Whether or not it is entirely true, what is clear is that Poles suffered terribly at the hands of Stalin's Soviet Union. I am sure there are many who suffered similar conditions beyond comprehension. Read up on the Katyn massacre. Much of what is written in this book is believable given this unfortunate fact.

Second, I have Amazoned this book to several people who have faced a daunting personal challenge in life, cancer, lost of a loved one, loss of a job etc. The lesson of this book is perseverence in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenge and misery. In this respect, the book is truly uplifting.

Finally, I lived in Poland for 5 years. Never understimate the tenacity of a Pole.

Cheers,

WilliamBanzai7

PS: Nice post

I certainly agree that the story is gripping. I've remembered it all these years for that reason.

I don't know if you looked at my reply, above, to not_abel, but I offered some further thoughts on the subject, including the observations that the Russians of that period lied incessantly about their atrocities against Poles and others, and that there were other, somewhat similar, exploits from the Eastern Front that were well-documented.

The part about the wife of a camp worker being overly dramatic may seem so.....but the Gulag produced many strange and unlikely occurances....some are described in Shalamov's Kolyma Tales that you mention............but Gulag Archipelago is jam packed with instances that are far more bizarre than the subversive wife.

Kipling wrote a story called ...."The Man Who Was".....about an English soldier who during the Crimean War comes into contact with the Russian army and is thrown into a Siberian Katorga camp........who eventually returns to England after his escape....many years later.

Some people think Rawicz's story is an adaptation of the Kipling story.

One of them.....Slate contributor....Anne Appelbaum....is about as definitive an expert on the Gulag system as anyone in the West.......and she is skeptical of the story's authenticity.

But who knows?

I guess I should thank you for that.