The Long Walk is not a true story. It was written during the Cold War era as a way to bring attention to the gulags in Siberia. It was probably written by British intelligence.

When a book is put in history in Barnes and Noble, I tend to take their word for it. I was not expecting to find Susquatch or Yeti appear in a historical book, but these so-called prisoners encounter Yeti in the Himalayas.

Don't waste your time or money on this piece of fictional drivel.

When reading these types of stories, I always feel that some parts of the story could be embellished. Believing they see a Yeti, for example, can be a hallucination or a far off view of a local clothed for the weather.

Whether or not this story is 100% true or partially true, I do not know. However, I do know there are many stories that come out of times such as those, WWII, WWI, etc., that are so fantastic they might be unbelievable but are true.

I will say as I said before, the book is an excellent read. For anyone who has an interest in WWII and the trials and tribulations of what many went through to survive, this might (I said might) add to the insight of what was going on in Russia. If you read other books describing the Russian front, this story doesn't seem so far fetched, but who knows.

There are few people left that lived through WWII. Many people experienced unbelievable things to survive and be among us today. I sometimes wonder how our current society would survive in those types of circumstances, without cellphones, computers, iPods, iPads, indoor plumbing, electricity, etc., etc., etc. I hope we never have to find out.

Currently I am reading "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption", another "unbelievable", but apparently better documented story of survival in the Pacific theater of WWII. Two airmen spend 47 days lost on the Pacific Ocean with only their wits to survive catching rain water and birds/fish to survive, is just the beginning of their trek. A third airman died along the way.

There are other problems with this story besides the abominable snowmen appearing in it. Walking miles across the frozen tundra of Siberia past Lake Baikal down through the Himalayas and the Gobi Desert (with nothing to drink) over to India. Not a chance this happened.

If people are interested in reading about the Soviet prison system and that grim time under Stalin's reign, there are several good and accurate books: Gulag Archipelago I,II, and III should give anyone their fill of it. Solzhenitsyn lived it and certainly had an axe to grind.

I love personal accounts of history, but when someone embellishes to the point of being absurd then all of their work is called into question. This is what happened to Rawicz. His story is too far fetched.

I've been to Lake Baikal. You are right, it reminds me of northern Minnesota and Canada. I am not saying it is a tundra, I said their camp was up in northern Siberia and they walked to Lake Baikal then over to Mongolia through the Gobi... yeah, right. That's some true story.

the book is complete fraud, claiming that it is a true story. the author was never in a Siberian camp. Google his name. he was a prisoner of war, but was in a jail near Moscow, then he was pardoned and freed in 1942 and went back to his troops.
The story is for those who do not question what they read. It is physically impossible to cross a desert without having water for weeks. they would be dehydrated and burnt by the sun to death. it is impossible to run in a deep Siberian snow 40 km a day. it is impossible to make a hole with a log in the river Lena ice- in April ice in the river Lena is 6 feet deep. it is impossible to squeeze water out of a coat after falling under the ice and it is impossible to put this coat back on yourself and run in this coat- it would be frozen solid like a tin. there are NO blooming cherry and apricot trees in Siberia in May!!!!
Seeing a Yetti is the most truthful part of the story. LOL.

I do not know if the story is true in totality, however, I know of two men who were members of the Polish army at the outbreak of WWII. These men were captured by the Russians during the early invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia. As you will recall, the Germans and Russians had initiated a non aggression pact in 1939. The Russians invaded Poland from the east while the Germans came in from the west. Russian captured Poles were either murdered or sent to Gulags in Siberia.

My friends were sent to Siberian gulags. When the Germans turned on the Russians on June 22, 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, the Russians opened the doors of the Gulags and freed the Poles telling them of the changing events and that they were now fighting a common enemy. The Poles were given no assistance in finding their way back to Poland. These men then began a journey south through Siberia deciding to make for Iran that was at the time under the control of the British. The hardships and events described tome of their adventure were eerily similar to those written in the book by Slavomir Rawicz. I do not believe either of these men heard or knew of Rawicz. Both live in the States, one became an engineer for Chevron Oil and I have never caught him exaggerating anything. He befriended me while making preparations to travel to Poland to visit relatives there and I pried the stories out of him. I too found the journey across the Gobi and Himalaya Mountains unbelievable but there have been numerous recorded stories of survival under difficult conditions so I can not write the book and film off as total fiction.

In 1940 wnen Richard Krebs book "Out of the Night" came out many ladies of our church poo poo'd the book sayong that the stories of cruelty suffered by Krebs must be a fabrication.
True or not, I liked the book and I am looking forward to the movie.

The Long Walk A True Story Of A Trek To Freedom (1956)
© 1956, 1984, 1997, by Slavomir Rawicz, Helped by Ronald Downing, as says the book’s title page in the paperback I have plus it has the 1956 Foreword by Ronald Downing, the Introduction to the Polish Edition, 1993, by the author, and the Afterword to 1997 Edition, by author. So I get the latest living examples of the . . . I am sorry, a fraud.

The ‘The Long Walk’ book adventure is a fraud. It is not just a fraud by its showing of its obvious physical-human-body impossibilities, and there are a lot of those, such as the water and salt deficiencies, but also the food deficiencies.

The story also is not possible because of its too-weird ways mixed in with too-various ways of its telling, the language and wording and phrasing. There are the very matters of language and talking and conversation that are not realistic here --- and, so, even though with the ones the travelers meet they manage to talk to, the story itself lacks a realistic voice and voicing. There is the very origin of the very telling, a writer as originally as a journalist, and there seems to be more than one teller, though the teller, the author, claims he is the teller alone. OH!!!! NO!!! Please read the Ronald Downing explanation.

Yes, there is such a thing as a story-teller who knows the showings and the wailings and the meanings and the spools, and the twisting of motions and emotions and the physical and the even impossible, enough to fool others, and such as they can not see the foolery of their own over the others, for they are entertainers, and they are in the love by their payers and their pay . . .

I am all for this story at my first reading and again, but up to one half of it, before I figure it a fraud, and, as it is a good read, as certainly if as but not a reality, I still enjoy it. Slavomir Rawicz might be weirded-out by some horrible-entire experience, mentally over-demanded, so I give the story that out, due to his his entrancements and delusions and mental traumas, OK. But it is a not-true account and, I assert, a fraud from all of that, and I get that all as limitations as to the ‘author’ but not as to the writer. There are the journalist’s desires.

Who is this Slavomir Rawicz protecting by telling us this all? He never gives the names of any as he is to be protecting by giving no names? OH! What names but the USSR woman, the wife of the camp commander, who helps him escape? Does she ever suffer? DUH. Such humanitarianism of our ‘hero’ ???

Our hero makes no sense nor needs to. Nor does 14 days no water and no and no salt and no food. I get the politics and the dementia but not the physical reality.

But the continuation of all of it is that I make it like my own fantasies of my own life, and he is a lot better at his fantasy making, and knows who to talk to, but he is not a real of what he says. He is experiencing of enough to talk of much but not enough to be other than a FRAUD, however much experiential of snow, ice, sand, lack of salt, lack of water, lack of food and getting only salt water. Maybe he speaks from the hallucinations and delusions due to his lots of horrors, physical pains, and personal sorrows, such things as I have experience of only by the tellings of the ones I meet, from their horrors and terrors and delusions and mental’s, as they say, and such as is of my personal life.

But by 1997, year of the afterword of the book, then, he is either still paid off, &, or, still, a liar, &, or, or, he is still stuck with his fantasies, or severals, for who is left to infect, accuse, or hurt ... except the wife of the camp commander and the commander’s self, already done in 1956.

PLEASE NOTE: How does a he, Slavomir Rawicz, the author, suffering as he describes it, acting as he describes it, in the first hospital, in India, with hallucinations and physical disabilities, survive later in a hospital for eighteen months, in Palestine, only to just walk out and re-join the army? And how does this medical-all get him well-enough to volunteer for any kind of real entry into the army-military again, including the air-force???? DUH!!! I can go on and on.

I love the story and his anti-USSR anti-Stalinist anti-Nazi stands, but that political standing itself makes me wonder about the entire thing. What does it mean to HIM??? NOTHING is here, even later. Liar Liar Liar, or kinda sorta but not quite on the number. . . .
But the story is good as a story. It is a compilation of more than one lie and more than one exaggeration.

Fascinating how this two year old post gets new comments from time to time. Apparently there are people obsessed about this book and its veracity, and make it their life's work to seek out opportunities to discredit it. Wonder what's up with that?