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The Book of the Week is “The Long Walk, The True Story of A Trek to Freedom” by Slavomir Rawicz with Ronald Downing, originally published in 1956. The author told a suspenseful story of how he stayed alive after having been sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labor in Siberia.
In the nineteen-teens, Rawicz was born into a family who owned an estate in Pinsk. His mother was Russian, so he became fluent in the Russian language. In autumn 1939, he was a lieutenant in the Polish Cavalry fighting against the Nazis. He was arrested by the Russians, accused of spying, and sent to Siberia. He and some other men plotted to escape from their work-camp, which was encircled by three barbed-wire fences, guards and guard-dogs. They left in a snowstorm in April 1941.
The escapees endured countless life-threatening conditions during their walk of thousands of miles through rough terrain, meteorological extremes, and deteriorating health. Their food along the way included fish, hare, deer and snakes (in the Gobi desert). The one American in the group told them that beheading a snake would remove the sac containing its poison (if it was poisonous), and then skinning the body and cooking it would make it edible. When they reached Mongolia and Tibet, they were served tea with yak butter, oat cakes, gruel and mutton by herders whose culture required showing hospitality to strangers.
At the end of their ordeal, the author and the other survivors happened to meet members of the Allies who nursed them back to health. Doctors and nurses knew they would have what is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for the rest of their lives.
Read the book to learn the details.