On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a gulag.Īfter a three-month journey in the dead of winter to Siberia, life in a Soviet labour camp meant enduring hunger. Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer.

Richardson, a British diplomat stationed in Lhasa.'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'

Over the years, critics of the book's accuracy have included Peter Fleming (the brother of Ian Fleming), Eric Shipton and Hugh E.

The BBC report does mention the account of Captain Rupert Mayne, an intelligence officer in Calcutta, who - years after the war - said that in 1942 he had debriefed three emaciated men claiming to have escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp. The story of the escape to India comes from Rawicz himself. Aside from matters concerning his health, his arrival in Palestine is verified by the records. Polish Army records show that Rawicz left the USSR directly for Iran in 1942, which contradicts the book's storyline. Soviet records confirm that Rawicz was a Polish soldier imprisoned in the USSR, but differ from The Long Walk in detail on the reasons for his arrest and the exact places of imprisonment. Gliński's claims have been questioned by various sources. In May 2009, Witold Gliński, a Polish WWII veteran living in the UK, came forward to claim that the story of Rawicz was true, but was actually an account of what happened to him, not Rawicz.

In 2006, BBC released a report based on former Soviet records, including 'statements' allegedly 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 and that his escape to India never occurred. 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 walked over 6,500 km (4,000 mi) south, through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas to finally reach British India in the winter of 1942. Slavomir Rawicz ( Sławomir Rawicz) was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the Soviets after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland.

Long walk book slavomir rawicz