The Long Walk

The True Story of a Trek to Freedom


By Slavomir Rawicz


This is a riveting, unbelievable survival story. Beginning as an unjustly imprisoned prisoner of the gulag system, with all the accompanying dehumanization and torture, this story moves into Siberia and then escape. I loved this book and the story of this group of people willing to risk the unknown trek with a possibility of survival rather than stay with the known horrors of the concentration camp. I want to remember the people - Kristina, Zaro "the joker ", Kolemenos "the giant", the "American", all friends. Survivors.


From the author's introduction:
"I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves. I had to tell my story as a warning to the living, and as a moral judgement for the greater good." Pg. xii


Quotes from the book:
"I had been walking slowly round left hand in the now characteristic prisoner's attitude of supporting the top of the issue trousers, which Russian ingenuity supplied without buttons or even string on the quite reasonable assumption that a man preoccupied with keeping up his pants would be severely handicapped in attempting to escape." Pg. 3


"In pain and filth and degradation they try to turn a man into a whimpering beast." Pg. 3


"The Bull must have been something special even in the NKVD. He ran his interrogation sessions like an eminent surgeon, always showing off his skill before a changing crowd of junior officers, assembled like students at an interesting operation. His methods were despicably ingenious." Pg 7


"The men I most admired were the jokers. They saved us often in our blackest moments. There were maybe four or five of them in our lot. They would joke about anything. Their quips were frequently macabre, almost always earthy and pungent with the good strong language that men use. They were irrepressible. Nothing stopped them. I bless their memory for the gutsy belly laughs they gave us as they aped the train commandant, the Russian guards, anything and everything Russian." Pg 32 - 33


"The problem posed by the little Jewish shopkeeper just could not be answered, I decided. Germans or Russians? For the Pole in my position in 1939 there was little choice. There were plenty more like me on this train, who had thought that fighting the Nazis might be a passport to Soviet clemency." Pg. 38


"There was, by now, one slight improvement in our condition. Following the example of one unknown minor genius, we had made trouser-fasteners from twigs threaded through the waist bands. Now we had both hands free." Pg. 39


"The wind had jagged teeth that made me feel quite naked to its attack. Men stood in the snow and looked bleakly at one another. All the tears were not caused by the cutting wind." Pg. 40


"These people make me feel very humble. They do a lot to wipe out bitter memories of other people who have lost their respect for humanity." Pg 199


Book 15