In 2006 the BBC released a report based on former Soviet 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, and that his escape to India never occurred. They travelled through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas to finally reach British India in the winter of 1942.
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). Peter Fleming (brother of Ian) refused to believe anybody in our condition could walk 6,500 kilometers across mountains, wilderness and desert, while others cast doubt on anybody’s ability to traverse the Gobi Desert on foot, without a support team.Sławomir Rawicz (1 September 1915 – 5 April 2004) was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the NKVD after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland.
When the book first appeared, the mountaineer Eric Shipton dismissed it as fiction, largely based on the Himalayan chapter and my ‘claim’ to have encountered a Yeti (aka Abominal Snowman). Now I know that worldwide exposure on the big screen kicked up a storm of controversy about the credibility of my story, but this was nothing new. It has been a source of inspiration for thousands of people, including renowned adventurers such as Benedict Allen, and in 2010 was the source for Peter Weir’s feature film, The Way Back, itself a source of inspiration for those disinclined to pick up a book. Released in 1955 and now translated into 25 languages, The Long Walk has remained in print ever since. My name is Slawomir Rawicz, and though not a native of Nottingham, I settled here after the Second World War, married a local girl and co-wrote my account of the escape from the Soviet Gulag Camp 303 here. Political cartoonist John ‘Brick’ Clark explains how the incredible story of Slawomir Rawicz has had a profound effect on his life.
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