The Long Walk

'I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves'

Slavomir Rawicz

Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a gulag.

After a three-month journey in the dead of winter to Siberia, life in a Soviet labour camp meant enduring hunger, extreme cold, untreated wounds and illnesses and facing the daily risk of arbitrary execution. Realising that to remain meant almost certain death, Rawicz, along with six companions, escaped. In June 1941, they crossed the trans-Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and freedom in British India nine months later, in March 1942, having travelled over four thousand miles on foot through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert, Tibet and the Himalayas.

First published in 1956, this is one of the greatest true stories of escape, adventure and survival against all odds.

In 2010, a film, The Way Back, based on the book, directed by six-time Academy Award-nominee Peter Weir (Master and Commander, The Truman Show, and The Dead Poets Society) was released. It starred Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess and Ed Harris.

“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”

Positively Homeric. -- Cyril Connolly The Times
The Long Walk is a book that I absolutely could not put down and one that I will never forget. -- Stephen Ambrose
A poet with steel in his soul. New York Times
One of the most amazing, heroic stories of this or any other time. Chicago Tribune
A book filled with the spirit of human dignity and the courage of men seeking freedom. Los Angeles Times
Heroism is not the domain of the powerful; it is the domain of people whose only other alternative is to give up and die . . . [The Long Walk] must be read - and reread, and passed along to friends. National Geographic Adventure
The ultimate human endurance story . . . told with clarity, vivid description, and a good dash of romance and humor. Vancouver Sun
One of the epic treks of the human race. Shackleton, Franklin, Amundsen . . . History is filled with people who have crossed immense distances and survived despite horrific odds. None of them, however, has achieved the extraordinary feat Rawicz has recorded. He and his companions crossed an entire continent - the Siberian Arctic, the Gobi Desert and then the Himalayas - with nothing but an axe, a knife and a week's worth of food . . . His account is so filled with despair and suffering it is almost unreadable. But it must be read - and re-read. -- Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm
Essentially it comes down to some sort of inner tenacity and that is what is so gripping about the book because you know that this is actually about all of us. It's not just some Polish bloke who wanted to get home. It's about how we all struggle on every day. Somehow or other we find a reason to keep on going and it's the same here but on an epic scale. -- Benedict Allen, explorer and bestselling author of Into the Abyss and Edge of Blue Heaven

SLAVOMIR RAWICZ was born in Pinsk, Belarus, in 1915. After the war, he settled in Nottingham, England, where he worked as a handicrafts and woodworking instructor, a cabinet-maker and later as a technician in architectural ceramics at a school of art and design. He married an English woman, with whom he had five children. In 1975, after a heart attack, he retired and lived in the countryside until his death in 2004.

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