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Title: The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz ISBN: 1-55821-684-7 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (203 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Spectacular adventure story
Comment: Slavomir Rawicz was a young cavalry officer in the Polish Army at the outbreak of WWII. After Poland was divided among the Germans and Soviets, Rawicz was arrested and sentenced to hard labor in the Siberian gulag. The tales of the terrible journey to get to the gulag are epic in their own right. The overcrowded cattle car the Poles rode in (those in the center suffocated; those on the outside froze to death; all died standing up because they were packed in like sardines); being hitched to reindeer and dragged through a raging blizzard, where men who dropped were shot or left to die in the snow; then they had to build the camp once they arrived. Rawicz and some of his fellow prisoners, which include a mysterious American named Mr. Smith, decide to escape come summer. They develop an incredible plan to walk to British India. Once the time is right, they sneak out of the camp and begin a journey over thousands of miles. They encounter no real problems in Siberia, even picking up a runaway girl, but once they enter Mongolia and the Gobi Desert, it's a different story. They have no food, water, or map, and no knowledge of desert survival. They run across NO human beings during this time. They enter Tibet and find people, seemingly the friendliest people on earth despite the language barrier, and eventually cross the Himalayas, fighting cold, bottomless crevasses, and even a Yeti! (the most doubtful part of the book; this incident is also described as fact in Bernard Heuvelman's 'On the Track of Unknown Animals', the cryptozoology bible). True or not, this is all-in-all a great adventure read. I passed it around, and everyone I gave it to liked it.
Rating: 5
Summary: An amazing story
Comment: It is hard to imagine the hardships that Rawicz went through during WWII. He was a Polish soldier, newly married, and, along with a mysterious American, was captured and confined in a prison in Moscow. They were then sent by rail to a location south of Lake Baikal and forced to march hundreds of miles north where they had to build their own prison camp. He and others, including the American, escaped in the dead of winter so that the snow would cover their tracks. Always fearful of being captured by the Russians, they often walked at night. They marched south for about a year, crossing the Gobi desert and the Himalayan mountains (one chapter gives a quite credible account of seeing a pair of Abdominable snowmen). After reaching India and recovering in a hospital, the survivors went their separate ways. (Look at a map - they marched from northern Lake Baikal to India!!) The amount of suffering described is unimaginable.
The book ends there. However, I was so intrigued that I wrote the publisher (in early 1995) and received a nice letter from Rawicz, now living in Nottinghamshire, England! Unfortunately, none of the survivors of the long walk ever reunited again. The mysterious American has remained just that (Rawicz theorizes that he may have been an intelligence officer and thus maintained secrecy - he went by the name Mr. Smith). This book was orignally written in the early 1950s.
Rating: 4
Summary: it WAS a LOOOONG walk!
Comment: amazing..... but the book bogged down so much in the middle.... probably like the journey tho!
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Title: We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth, Stephen E. Ambrose ISBN: 1558219730 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival by Joe Simpson ISBN: 0060730552 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard ISBN: 0786704373 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing ISBN: 078670621X Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger ISBN: 0140095144 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: March, 1985 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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