Posted on 05/14/2003 7:26:30 AM PDT by Valin
This week I want to talk with you about two extraordinary books that deal with the twin themes of survival and freedom.
Was it fate? Kismet? The Luck of the Polish? Two outstanding books arrived at my house in the same week. Both recount true stories of hardship and survival in the Gulag of Soviet Russia. Both are told by Poles -- one Jewish, one not -- who patriotically fought the Nazi invaders in 1939 and for their trouble were arrested, tortured and jailed by the Soviets. Both lived to tell about it -- one escaped from a Siberian work camp and walked 4,000 miles to freedom; the other survived one of the most deadly of the work camps.
There is so much history, so much heroism, so much horror in these books it's difficult to know where to begin in telling you about them.
The Long Walk, The True Story of a Trek to Freedom was first published in 1956 by Slavomir Rawicz, and this spring it is being republished in paperback by The Lyons Press.
It's an amazing, true story. The author escaped with five others from Soviet Labor Camp #303 near the Arctic Circle. They spent a year living off the land, walking south over 4,000 miles of the most forbidding terrain on Earth. They braved the desolate Siberian tundra, icy rivers, the great Gobi Desert and the Himalayas, always close to death. Most of the time they had to hide from the civilian population and their pursuers. They had no map, no compass -- only an ax head, a homemade knife, and the unswerving determination to survive.
Rawicz writes, "In 1939 I was Lieutenant Rawicz of the Polish Cavalry, aged 24, slim and smart in my well-tailored uniform and whipcord breeches and shining riding-boots." After his arrest by the Soviet secret police everything changed: "Here in Moscow, shambling through the echoing narrow corridors of the Lubyanka (prison) between my two guards, I was a man almost shorn of identity, ill-fed, abysmally lonely, trying to keep alive some spark of resistance in the dank prison atmosphere of studied official loathing and suspicion of me."
From the comfort of soft sheets and full refrigerators, and the safety of half a century on, The Long Walk could be just one more survival story from a long-gone war, on a shelf full of similar stories. But this one is different -- more chilling, more inspirational. The London Times reviewer called it "Positively Homeric."
My copy is book marked with a dozen post-it notes, each pointing to a passage so compelling or extraordinary that I wanted to be able to find it again. It's not that this book is great literature -- it is very plain, journalistic in style. It is rich in incident. Like all good books it forces the reader to reflect on his own history, his own survival stories.
Rawicz is still alive, in his eighties, living with his second family in England, answering all letters and raising money for orphans in Poland.
He sums it up: "There are many other stories. I am not the only one.... What is most important is the deeply felt conviction that freedom is like oxygen, and I hope The Long Walk is a reminder that when lost, freedom is difficult to regain."
The Long Walk begins with the show trial in Moscow. Rawicz writes, "It was a crazy trial, run by madmen. It became in the end a test of endurance between one weak, half-starved, ill-used Pole and the powerful, time-squandering State machine."
From Moscow Rawicz was transported in a sealed cattle car with thousands of other prisoners on a slow and secret 3,000 mile train trip to Siberia. The final slog to the prison camp was accomplished this way: the prisoners were handcuffed to frozen chains and forced to drag fully loaded trucks through several Siberian blizzards all the way to the camp. Rawicz counted the casualties by noting how many handcuffs became vacant as the prisoners were moved up the chain to fill empty slots. One in ten died along the march. More died in the first weeks in camp.
Within a few months at the prison camp Rawicz had arranged an escape with several other hardy souls. After all the privations, the worst part was about to begin.
I was reminded, reading this memoir, of the novel Cold Mountain which also concerns a fearsome trek through the wilderness to the putative safety of home. Cold Mountain, although a first rate novel, lacks the abundant chilling details of The Long Walk.
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