Long Walk: The True Story Of A Trek To Freedom

Bought this as a Christmas present along with a pile of other books for my relative. She has read and re-read this book and found it really interesting how these young men escaped a gulag and endured a huge journey on foot.

割とよくある話ですが、逃亡して歩く先々で、助けをさしのべる各国の民族の特徴が描かれていて、興味深いものがありました。また、狩猟をして肉は食べるのだが、野菜を摂取することの大事さに気付かされます。

Completed this book yesterday, really amazing. I felt i was travelled with them. 3 years before i watched the movie The Wayback which one inspired from this book.

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I'm not sure that every guy at McClintock Jr. High School read "The Long Walk" in 1958, but Slavomir Rawicz's 1956 book definitely enjoyed a cult following there. After all, almost every kid's old man had played some part in the War, South Pacific or Europe; and there was a ton of wartime pulp to be read, and I believe we must have read the better part of it. We read books like: "God is my Co-Pilot," "Thirty Seconds over Tokyo," "The Longest Day," "Guadalcanal Diary," "The Naked and the Dead." The list could go on. There were the books with a slightly forbidden flavor by our former enemies: "Zero," "Commando Extraordinary," "The Road to Stalingrad." But "The Long Walk," stood in its own special category. I found it hard to put down at age fourteen, and, rereading it fifty jaded years later, I still couldn't put this one down. Only now I'm wondering if perhaps I've just read a great novel by a certain Ronald Downing. Back in '58 we didn't have the 1997 afterword in which Slav Rawicz uses the term: "read between the lines." We didn't have the 1993 introduction to the Polish edition in which Slav writes, "If this little book has served in a small way as propaganda to understand the past years of our history under the Soviets, then my words will have achieved their purpose." The structure of the book does make for the perfect road story, a framework upon which to hang a string of episodes: capture, imprisonment, torture, deportation, the camp, the escape, the journey. The assemblage of seven compatriots is reminiscent of the "Seven Samurai," or "The Magnificent Seven." Consider the character types of the escapees: the gentle giant, the little jokester, the American--and the girl Kristina. Add the superbly generous character of the Tibetans--by then weren't the Chinese kicking them around? In short: read this book and you will not like communists, but then, you didn't in the first place, did you? Having said all that, what a pleasure it is to learn that Slav lived to a ripe old age, raising five children with a devoted wife, living to see Poland independent again, living to see the USSR dissolve. And if Slav and Ronald Downing chose to insert a few whoppers along the way, I say: who are we to let facts stand in the way of a good story? Slav wrote in his 1997 afterword that he had received many letters over the years, and that he enjoyed answering them. I wish I'd been a little sooner rediscovering "The Long Walk." I might have written Mr. Rawicz myself, and here's what I would have said: Dear Mr. Rawicz, I know you have received many letters over the years and mine will probably eco much of what those others have said. However, if I might add anything, it is that since reading your book fifty years ago at age fourteen I have never to my memory left a plate of food un-cleaned; countless times I have been disgusted by the sight of unfinished plates being scraped into the garbage by others. Many times I have thought of you and your companions as I passed trash left by the roadside, trash that you could have used. (A few plastic soda bottles might have made all the difference on the Gobi.) I like to wear a thing out before discarding it. I do hate to be cold, but I try to refrain from complaining about it. So thank you, Mr. Rawicz, for inspiring the boy I was fifty years ago to take up frugal ways. I'm sure my bankroll is thicker for it. I would observe that, while you may have aimed a blow at communism, you also made a good hit at consumer capitalism!