Rawicz, Slavomir

Sławomir Rawicz (Polish pronunciation: [swaˈvɔmir ˈravit͡ʂ]; 1 September 1915 – 5 April 2004) was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the NKVD after the Soviet invasion of Poland. In a ghost-written book called The Long Walk, he claimed that in 1941 he and six others had escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp and begun a long journey south on foot (about 6,500 km or 4,000 mi), supposedly travelling through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas before finally reaching India in the winter of 1942. In 1955, one year before the publishing of The Long Walk, German Author Josef Martin Bauer released So weit die Füße tragen, a German language book about fictionalized Soldier Clemens Forell (later identified to be former Wehrmacht Soldier Cornelius Rost) which claims a similar narrative about a Siberian escape and subsequent journey to Iran. Rost's account was proven factually untrue im 2010 by journalist Arthur Dittlmann.[1] In 2006, the BBC released a report based on former Soviet records, including statements written by Rawicz himself, showing that Rawicz had been released as part of the 1942 general amnesty of Poles in the USSR and subsequently transported across the Caspian Sea to a refugee camp in Iran, leading the report to conclude that his supposed escape to India never occurred. In May 2009, Witold Gliński, a Polish World War II veteran living in the UK, came forward to claim that the story of Rawicz was true, but was actually an account of what happened to him, not Rawicz. Gliński's claims have been severely questioned by various sources. The son of Rupert Mayne, a British intelligence officer in wartime India, stated that in 1942, in Calcutta, his father had interviewed three emaciated men who claimed to have escaped from Siberia. According to his son, Mayne always believed that their story was the same as that of The Long Walk—but telling the story decades later, his son could not remember their names or any details. Subsequent research failed to unearth confirmatory evidence for the story.