Product Description

One of the world s greatest stories of adventure, survival and escape. Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 9th November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation in Moscow s infamous Lubyanka prison and a farce of a trial, he was sentenced to 25 years hard labour in the Gulags, for spying . After a three-month jounrey to Siberia in the depths of winter he escaped with six companions, realising that to stay in the camp meant almost certain death. In June 1941 they crossed the trans- Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and, finally, freedom nine months later in March 1942 after travelling on foot for 4,000 miles through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert. By the end he author weighed just five stone and three of the seven had died.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7334 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
An heroic tale desperately live and compellingly told, Rawicz carries us with each weakening step, sustained by his simple undying vision of the liberty that lies beyond the cruel emptiness of Siberia and the sterile gravles of the Gobi. The Long Walk is an odyssey through the wastelands of Asia and the vastness of the soul - a classic of triumph over despair, of beauty found in the Void --Benedict Allen

An inspring tale of human courage and endurance. --Cyril Conolly, The Times

About the Author
Slavomir Rawicz was born in Pinsk in 1915. After his ordeal of The Long Walk he settled in England in 1944 were he remained for the rest of his life working in education. He died in 2004

Customer Reviews

From paranoid nightmare to a triumph of survival.
From page one this is a gripping and absorbing read. We start off with the capture and imprisonment of Polish cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz, an ordeal that Franz Kafka would have been proud to have written. Accused of spying on the Russians, Slavomir is brutually tortured and beaten before being given a farcical trail that ends up with him being given the sentence of 25 years in a Siberian forced labour camp, on the basis of no evidence and a forged confession. It is here that the action begins to kick in to a more gung-ho spirit. Loaded into freezing cold railway cars and then slowly "chugged" across Russia, almost four thousand miles, to what was thought to be the prison. More agony is piled onto the men as they are chained together and frog marched hundreds of miles through bitter winds and biting snow blizzards until many weeks and many deaths later, prisoners and guards alike, the men finally arrive at their destination. It is a tribute to the writer that while writing of his tribulations he never once seems to feel bitter outrage or acrimony against his Siberian jailers, rather he feels an apathy for them as it seems to be indicated that even the guards here are victims of some small fault against the Russian mother state. Once the prison camp is reached, fans of great escape stories will become gripped as allegiances are formed and slowly an escape plan is hatched. To write too much would be to give too much away, but surfice to say that the team of seven men escape with some help from a very unexpected source and the escape is well and truly underway. From the freezing savage Siberian snow plains to the complete opposite but perhaps more unbearable searing heat of the Gobi, with only a couple of sticks and a tin mug between them, the story will simultaneously make you cry, laugh and occasionally feel proud to be human as the better sides of a man's personality and being are brought to light in a truly touching way. The end of the book comes all too soon, and one feels saddened that we do not learn more of our heros, but perhaps the story needs to finish there as perhaps to learn too much of what happened later might take some of the power from the story; and although part of me would like to know for certain the eventual fate of our intrepid adventurers, I feel they are given a more mythical stature by only existing up to the point of thier journeys completion. Forget trashy, clever, oh so chic summer novels about marketing executives trying to find their Mister Right whilst obsessing about everything they possibly can and lose yourself in a good old fashioned ripping yarn that deserves to go down as one of the greatest stories ever told.

An inspirational story of human courage.
Once I started to read this book I quite literally couldn't put it down. Slavomir's inhuman treatment in Russian prisons after his arrest was quite graphic. The 3-week rail journey taken by the prisoners to Eastern Siberia in the depths of winter with almost no food or water meant that older or weaker men died quickly in the icy cold box-cars. Those who survived that ordeal then had to walk 1000 miles to their camp in the far north. The story really begins with the escape-an adventure of truly epic proportions follows as they journey to India some 4000 miles away. Always they meet with people who have little themselves but are willing to share their homes and their food with the strangers. Several of them die on the journey. The crossing of the Gobi Desert made me wonder how they could possibly survive for 12 days without water in that environment. The encounter with yeti in the Himalayas caused me to question how much of the story was fact and how much was fiction. But that doesn't spoil a story that will remain in readers hearts for long afterwards. Has anyone thought of turning this amazing story into a feature film?

A truly inspiring story of courage and determination
I am so pleased to see that this classic story of courage, determination and human endurance has been reissued. I first read it as a teenager in the 1970's and since then I have re-read it several times. I have also read a lot about Polish and Soviet history in the thirties, and the details described in the book strike me as utterly convincing. I once visited Kharkov where Slavomir Rawicz was imprisoned, but alas could find no trace of the fortress prison described. However I was taken to a mass grave of Polish officers just north of the city, where the author would surely have been shot if he had confessed to the trumped up charges levelled against him of his own free will. My favourite episode in the book is his description of the long winter march to the gulag :on discovering that it is Christmas day, the hapless zeks of various nationalities singing 'Silent Night', each in their own native tongue. A deeply moving scene. Like several other reviewers I wondered what had become of the author after the war, and so was delighted to learn that he lived his later life in a village outside Nottingham.