A Book Review for Half a Book

I recently have been reading my way through a book called The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz. It is a gripping story of seven Polish and Eastern European Prisoners of War who escape from a Siberian gulag in 1941 and walk through Mongolia, China and Tibet to reach British India.

Why do I say this is a review of half a book? Because halfway through the book I read about Slavomir Rawicz on Wikipedia and BBC News, and was more than a little stunned by the news: the story is not true! He was actually released from a camp in 1942 and sent to Iran, eventually making his way with other Polish emigres to England, but even there not performing the military role he claimed to have done.

I must say that I am more than a little disappointed by this news. The story is a fantastic story...although with the benefit of hindsight perhaps too fantastic (can seven overworked and undernourished men really escape from a Gulag and walk through metre-deep snow for six weeks going 30 miles a day on starvation rations?). The story also includes sightings of Yeti in the Himalayas, but alas apparently even that was added by the British ghost-writer who sought to validate their existence (I believe that they could exist, but like Mulder or Houdini on their personal quests the blatantly falsified information angers me all the more for the bad reputation it gives to such a search).

I am also more than a little disappointed because I would very much like to read an account that describes Stalinist Russia and its gulags as Elie Wiesel's "Night" describes Auschwitz. It is ironic that the Holocaust is such a well-documented and (despite the rantings of some such people as I described in my EuroParliament post) reasonably well-understood and well-studied event, while the Stalinist atrocities going on literally right next door are so poorly understood. Even the numbers are debated. There seems to be pitifully few accessible works in English for us Westerners to read on Gulags, and even less that is not written by those with political axes to grind (Soviet emigres and all varieties of Eastern Europeans at differing stages of war with the Soviet Union). I guess my search continues.

And I shall hopefully finish this work of fiction I set out reading as a piece of history. Churchill was right: Russia continues to be a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.