Twenty-six-year-old cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 during the German-Soviet partition of Poland and sent to the Siberian Gulag. In the spring of 1941, he escaped with six of his fellow prisoners, including one American. Thus began their astonishing trek to freedom.
With no map or compass but only an ax head, a homemade knife, and a week's supply of food, the compatriots spent a year making their way on foot to British India, through four thousand miles of the most forbidding terrain on earth. They braved the Himalayas, the desolate Siberian tundra, icy rivers, and the great Gobi Desert, always a hair's breadth from death. Finally arriving, Rawicz reenlisted in the Polish army to fight the Germans.
In the camps of the Siberian gulag, friends said it was hopeless. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1942 Slavomir Rawicz and four companions walked into British India, having journeyed four thousand miles by foot over tundra, Gobi, frozen rivers, and Himalayan peaks. A 26-year-old Polish cavalry officer arrested by the Soviets while home on leave in 1939, Rawicz survived on cunning, snake meat, and the kindness of countless strangers. Like a swimmer carefully counting breaths, John Lee narrates this astonishing adventure as if every word were a step on the long trek, the next phrase a precipice. His words resonate with Rawicz's text, savoring its long distances and carefully accommodating his pace to the tempo of the trek. Published originally in 1956, this timeless tale is given new life in Lee's fresh narration. P.E.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
Los Angeles Times...
It is a book filled with the spirit of human dignity and the courage of men seeking freedom.
About the Author
Slavomir Rawicz lived in England for many years after the war. He married an Englishwoman and lived in the countryside until his death in 2004.
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