They had traversed the frozen wastes of Siberia, struggled through the heat of the Gobi desert and passed over the Himalayas. Glinski claimed that he and six other men - a mysterious American called “Smith”, a Ukrainian wanted for murder called Batko, a Yugoslav café owner and three Polish soldiers - had broken out of the gulag near Yakutsk in February 1941. Despite this, in 2009 Witold Glinski, a Polish war veteran living in a bungalow in Cornwall, announced publicly that he was the last survivor of The Long Walk, telling John Dyson for an interview in Reader’s Digest how he had made the epic journey. First, according to the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, there was an amnesty document showing that Rawicz had been freed in 1942 (he claimed to have made his escape in 1941) and secondly, Rawicz had written in his own hand that he had been freed and went to Persia, not India. Two key pieces of evidence, researched by the American writer Linda Willis, undermined the truth of Rawicz’s story. Rawicz, who died in 2004, claimed to have been one of the escapees, but in 2006 a BBC Radio Four documentary exposed Rawicz’s story as fiction. In 1955 a book of that name, written by a former Polish cavalry officer called Slawomir Rawicz, became an international bestseller it later inspired Peter Weir’s 2010 film The Way Back.

Whether The Long Walk ever happened at all is disputed, not to mention Glinski’s participation. Urn:oclc:2019021 Republisher_date 20150924023107 Republisher_operator Scandate 20150923082228 Scanner Glinski claimed to have taken part in the so-called ‘‘Long Walk’’, in which a group of prisoners was said to have escaped from a Second World War Siberian gulag and trekked 4,000 miles to freedom in British India. Urn:lcp:longwalk00slav:epub:597cee76-98ce-4e6a-b0f6-14685874a546 Extramarc University of North Carolina Foldoutcount 0 Identifier longwalk00slav Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t02z4w71z Invoice 1213 Isbn 1592289444ĩ8107014 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL8861654M Openlibrary_edition Internetarchivebookdrive Edition 1997 ed. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 14:20:22.003087 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA1131720 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Guilford, Conn.

Long walk by slavomir rawicz