One Word..... Blisters

The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom
Slavomir Rawicz

1941, War rages across Europe, Hitler is beginning to exterminate people in vast numbers, Hirohito is planning an attack on the all too ambivalent and uninvolved United States. In Siberia, near Yakutsk, seven political prisoners escape from the vast Stalinist Gulag system and begin a trek southward. This book tells the first hand account of that escape and the subsequent journey to India nearly 4,000 miles away. The prisoners cross vast swaths of Siberia – near or on the infamous Road of Bones – Mongolia, the Gobi Desert and parts of western China, Tibet including a swath of the Himalayas and finally enter India near modern-day Bangladesh. Only four of the prisoners survive the harrowing journey. This book is at times difficult to read, difficult to imagine and difficult to believe (first western 1st person account of the Yeti - and many other instances that are uncomfirmable and doubtful, though often blamed on memory fragmentation due to trauma), but the author assures us it all happened. Though to be nearly starving is hardship enough for most, the journey, death and obvious fear at times is overwhelming. The book is inconsistently written (Ghost written by Ronald Downing), but readable throughout and quite engaging. The review from The London Times called The Long Walk, “Positively Homeric” and I can’t disagree.

Related:
Worldwalk - Stephen Newman
The First Circle – Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Solzhenitzyn
Seven Years in Tibet - Heinrich Harrer