The long walk: the true story of a trek to freedom

New York: Lyons Press, 1997. 8vo, pp. xii, 3-242; double-page map; fine copy in a fine, unclipped dust jacket. Sławomir Rawicz (1915-2004) was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the NKVD after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. In a ghost-written book called The Long Walk, he claimed that in 1941 he and six others had escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp and begun a long journey south on foot (about 6,500 km or 4,000 mi), supposedly travelling through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas before finally reaching British India in the winter of 1942. As noted by Wikipedia, however, in 2006 the BBC released a report based on former Soviet (truncated) records, including statements written by Rawicz himself, showing that Rawicz had been released as part of the 1942 general amnesty of Poles in the USSR and subsequently transported across the Caspian Sea to a refugee camp in Iran, leading the report to conclude that his supposed escape to India never occurred. (Inventory #: 64102)