The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom, by Slavomir Rawicz. The Lyons Press, 1997, 256 pages.

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Incredible Journey

by William Merritt

I first heard of Slavomir Rawicz in an anthropology class at Duke University. At the time, he was the only Westerner to have written about parts of Asia that, by 1965, had been closed to outsiders, and anthropologists studied his book for clues to life in Mongolia, Western China, and Tibet. The thing that made Rawicz stick in my mind, though, was that he was not an anthropologist, and "The Long Walk" was not an account of an ethnographic expedition. He was a 26-year-old Polish cavalry officer. And the book was the story of his escape from a Soviet labor camp near the Arctic Circle in far-eastern Siberia.

"The Long Walk" had quite a bit of play in the early '50s but, by the time I learned of it, it had been out of print for years. When I finally located and read a copy in, of all places, the army hospital at Fort Ord, Calif., the book took an almost mythological position in my memory — not just for the extraordinary story of the 4000-mile hike to freedom across some of the worst terrain on the planet, but for the fact that, no matter how many times I mentioned the book, I never found anybody else who had heard of it. To my amazement, I came across a copy at Borders a few weeks ago and discovered that not only has the book been reissued, but that Rawicz is still alive and has written a new introduction. It was as if I had blundered on a copy of the "Odyssey" with a new introduction by the author, and a note that he could be contacted in England.

"The Long Walk" has got to be one of the most astonishing stories of human grit and will and defiance ever written. It is certainly the most astonishing I have ever read. In 1939, Rawicz was a 25-year-old reserve officer in the Polish cavalry who was called up, during his wedding, to defend his country against the simultaneous attacks of Stalin and Hitler. He witnessed what was probably the last cavalry charge in history, was wounded fighting the Nazis, captured by the Russians, sent to Lubyanka Prison, and tortured by the KGB. And when I say tortured, I mean tortured. Everything you imagined about Lubyanka Prison, and a lot of things that would never have crossed your mind, were done to Rawicz.

After a year of this, he was convicted in a bullshit Soviet trial for the crime of speaking Russian, sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag, and crammed with 5,000 other prisoners into a string of unheated cattle cars for a month of rolling eastward on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, to be dumped in the snow near Lake Baikal in December. The prisoners were chained together in groups of a hundred, marched 800 miles north through the Siberian winter until they were near the Arctic Circle, then left in a clearing to chop down trees and build their own prison camp.

Because Rawicz was the only prisoner in the entire place who was willing to admit he knew how to repair a radio, he became friends with the camp commandant's wife, and she helped organize his escape. One midnight during an April blizzard Rawicz, three Poles, two other Central Europeans, and a mysterious American who claimed to have been an engineer working on the Moscow subway, and would only identify himself as "Mr. Smith," slipped under the wire — and the real story begins.

The seven spent the rest of the long winter heading south through the snow at the rate of 20 to 30 miles a day. Spring found them back at Lake Baikal where they met a 17-year-old Polish girl named Kristina who had escaped from a women's work farm. Together, they worked their way around the lake, then crossed into Mongolia as summer hit. At every point that a bit of good sense or survival craft was needed, Mr. Smith turned out to be the one with the skills or knowledge to get them through.

They crossed the Gobi during the summer without water, supplies, or even decent directions. Kristina, along with one of the Poles, died in the desert. The rest made it to Tibet, where another Pole died. Fall turned to winter. They crossed the Himalayas in March, had almost made it to India when the way was blocked by a pair of eight-foot tall, shaggy, bipedal creatures, and they had to look for another route. The third Pole died, and the four survivors straggled into the Ganges Valley. Rawicz and the two other Central Europeans were taken to a hospital in Calcutta while Mr. Smith disappeared about his own business. Rawicz recovered, joined a free Polish unit, and was sent to the Middle East.

"The Long Walk" pushes all my buttons. From the murderous way the Communists treated their prisoners, the trial, the 25-year sentence to the Gulag, the solitary decency of the camp commandant's wife, the escape, the fortitude, the raw determination, and the ultimate survival of individual people, all of it is the way I see the world. And the way I want to see the world. And that makes it very easy for me to gloss over parts of the story that might not be quite as easy to gloss over if I had different buttons. A few weeks after rereading "The Long Walk," I can't help but suspect I might be like all those Democrats who ignore the howlers in "West Wing" because they want to tell themselves the show could be true, if only things were different.

Taken cold, some of the details Rawicz serves up are pretty hard to swallow. It's difficult to see why a camp commandant's wife would want prisoners to escape and, if this one did, why anybody who had survived a year of torture at the hands of the KGB would ever have opened up enough to let her help. It's hard to see how any band of men who were as used up as these guys must have been before they even set out could dead-head 30 miles a day through a late Siberian winter with no food, minimal clothing, and no snowshoes. It's hard to see how anybody without climbing experience, food, or the most minimal equipment could cross the Himalayas in the winter. And, it's damn near impossible to see how anybody could survive twelve days in the Gobi Desert in July without water.

More than that, there's a 1950s Hollywood feel to the story that doesn't ring true. Being called up to fight during a wedding sounds as much like hack writing as truth. Encountering a charming Polish girl freshly escaped from a work farm sounds even more Hollywoodish. As does the pretty way she died. As does the encounter with the Yeti.

And it seems very convenient that all the other Poles died so that, by the time Rawicz came to write his story, the survivors had scattered and nobody was left to confirm what they had gone through.

Still, one of the things that often happens to people who survive unbelievable ordeals is that other people refuse to believe them. One commentator claims to have tracked down a British officer who met a group of men who escaped over the Himalayas into India from a Soviet labor camp. And Rawicz's story is so Homeric, and some of the details are so convincing, that you can't help think there is something to them. When you put your mind to it, the individual quibbles are easy enough to rationalize.

The camp commandant's wife was from an old Czarist military family. Her brother and her father had both died fighting the Bolsheviks and she might well have been sympathetic to the prisoners. And, she might have had another agenda. She timed the escape to take place while her husband was away and his rival, the political colonel, was in charge — and available to be embarrassed — by what happened.

Kristina could well have been real, too. Plenty of other people just like her certainly were. Stalin deported hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Poles to Siberia.

The escapees weren't trying to climb the Himalayas. They were trying to avoid climbing the Himalayas. So, if there is any reasonable way through, they would have taken it. Even the encounter with the Yeti could have been true, if there were such things as Yetis.

As for day-to-day survival — the details of how they coped with food and clothing and shelter — there's plenty Rawicz left out of the book. He says so himself in the introduction. As for the material he left out — well these were tough guys, and they may have done some things that didn't make the final cut into the story. It happened often enough with other World War II survival tales.

Even the not dying of thirst is plausible if you tell yourself that, 1) maybe they just skirted along next to the Gobi instead of punching through the middle like they thought. It wasn't exactly as if there were road signs out there, or 2) they were so out of their heads with thirst, they really didn't count the days very accurately, or 3) Rawicz spoke very poor English and Ronald Downing, the writer who ghosted the book, just got the number of days wrong, or 4) Downing is a hack and embellished everything he thought he could get away with embellishing because he wanted to sell more copies. When you think about it, suppositions about Downing can paper over a lot of suspicions about this book.

Downing is a major wild card because, if there is one thing we know about Ronald Downing, it's that he doesn't seem to have left any tracks at all. Except for ghosting "The Long Walk," he doesn't even show up in Google. My grandfather died almost 60 years ago, yet you can still turn up his name from a single court case he argued in 1933. But you can't find anything about Downing. And writers leave just the kind of footprints Google was made to find.

Whatever you conclude about Downing, it's easy to invent plausibilities that make the story believable. But con artists always leave it to the victim to con himself by rationalizing the parts that don't make sense. The bottom line is: I don't know. "The Long Walk" is one hell of a book, if you believe it. It's Shackleton and Krakauer and "Ghost Soldiers," and eve-ry other survival story you ever heard, and then some. And if you don't believe it? Well, it's not the "Odyssey." It's plainly told, and it's not going to resonate down through the ages on literary worth alone. But it's still one hell of a story.

As for me, I can't shake the thought that the answers lie in a United States government file somewhere, covered with secrecy stamps, and containing a detailed intelligence report from a "Mr. Smith" who had been assigned to do a little undercover work on the Moscow subway.

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

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