I sent out enquiries to contacts in Poland, America, Lithuania, Finland, Latvia, Sweden and elsewhere. So now, 50 years on, I set out in a BBC Radio 4 documentary to investigate the claims.

Rawicz himself could never produce a single piece of evidence to support his story. 'It was just from the heart and - bang - you get this story of this man who lived this tale and I loved it for its simplicity.' One of today's leading explorers, Benedict Allen, says The Long Walk has served as a personal inspiration. He settled in Nottingham, UK after the war, died in 2004 The Spectator said 'the adventures it describes must be among the most extraordinary in which human animals have ever found themselves involved'. Cyril Connolly said it was 'positively Homeric'. It has sold over half a million copies and has been translated into 25 languages and is still in print.Ĭontemporary reviews raved about the story. Critics particularly questioned one chapter in the book where the walkers apparently see a pair of yetis.īut The Long Walk was a sensation. The only question is: is it true? From the start, a ferocious controversy has raged about whether anyone really could achieve this superhuman feat. They walked thousands of miles south from Siberia, through Mongolia, Tibet, across the Himalayas, to the safety of British India.

In The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz described how, during the Second World War, he and a group of prisoners broke out of a gulag in the Soviet Union in 1941. In 1956, a Polish man living in the English midlands published an extraordinary book that became one of the classic tales of escape and endurance. Did wartime prisoners really walk from Siberia to India? An epic story of human endurance is being challenged.

The long walk book slavomir rawicz