The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz: Book Review

This incredible book tells the true story of Slavomir Rawicz, a Pole who was arrested by the Soviets in 1939, charged with spying, and sent to a prison camp in Siberia. Rawicz's only "crime" was living too close to the Russian border, and soon after arriving at the camp, he and some fellow-prisoners began planning their escape. With the help of a sympathetic warden's wife, they amassed warm clothing and a few days' worth of food and set out on a trek covering thousands of miles, heading south through Siberia, through China, across the Gobi Desert, through Tibet, and over the Himalayas to freedom and asylum in British-controlled India.

Traveling mostly at night, eating snakes, rats, bark, fish, and anything else they can find, they move steadily south. Their clothes are rags; for shoes, they have only rough moccasins they replace along they way with skins from animals they have caught. Sick with scurvy, tormented by lice, the survivors keep walking. Of the six men who begin the trek, and a runaway girl who was also a prisoner and who joins them shortly after they begin, three die along the way of dehydration or exhaustion-the girl and two of Rawicz's male friends. The survivors bury them, pay their respects, and move on.

Rawicz's style is clear and direct. He understates the horrors of the camp and the long walk, and downplays his own determination and heroism. One fact about the trip tells more about the hell Rawicz went through than anything else: when he arrived in India, starved and exhausted, he was taken to a British hospital, where for a month he "screamed and raved in madness," reliving the torments of his capture, imprisonment and escape. The doctors kept him sedated and watched over him as he went through this. After a month, he woke up refreshed, with no memory of his madness at all.

After his escape and the Long Walk, Rawicz moved to England. The first person he told his story to was his wife, but for years he was still tormented by nightmares about his trip. Eventually his doctor told him he should write down all the horrors of his escape, and he did, resulting in this great book.

The book is a tribute to freedom and the human spirit. In an afterword, Rawicz says, "I did not write my story for personal gain. It was done as a memorial to all those whose name is Million, and who could not speak for themselves.... There are many similar stories. I am not the only one."

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