Witold Glinski

Retracing the steps of The Long Walk

by admin on December 1, 2010

in Explore, Global Explorers Now

Photo courtesy Tomasz Grzywaczewski.

A few months back we published a review of Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, the riveting memoir of a Polish cavalry officer who escaped a Siberian labor camp and walked 4,000 miles to freedom in India. At the time a controversy swirled around the book because Witold Glinski, another former Polish military officer living in England, had stepped forward to claim that Rawicz had stolen the story from him. Now three Polish men have just retraced the steps of The Long Walk. When we published our review, Tomasz Grzywaczewski, one of the expedition members, told us in an e-mail that his team had met and interviewed Witold Glinski and believed his tale. Now, 4,000 miles later, Grzywaczewski is more sure than ever that Glinski is telling the truth. “Our aim was to show that the real hero of the Great Escape was a Polish man named Witold Glinski. Not Slavomir Rawicz. And to prove that it had happened,” he told ExWeb in an interview on November 28. Grzywaczewski said the most difficult parts of the journey were the rugged Siberian mountains and the Gobi desert, and that throughout the trip they encountered “fantastic” people, especially in the Tibetan plateau. Check out the expedition website.

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Book of the month—The Long Walk

by admin on May 21, 2010

in Read, Survival

The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom, Slavomir Rawicz’s story of his escape from a Siberian labor camp during World War II, is one of the most extraordinary survival stories ever published. Rawicz, a Polish cavalry officer fighting against the Germans, was arrested in 1939 by the Russian “liberators” of Poland and accused of espionage. After months of torture and an absurd trial, Rawicz was sentenced to 25 years’ hard labor in a Soviet prison camp. With help from a sympathetic insider at the camp, he recruited a group of like-minded inmates and prepared to escape. During a swirling storm, they scaled fences and slipped under barbed wire into the frigid Siberian night. Ravenous and suffering from exposure, the ragged band of men—plus a Polish girl who has escaped from a women’s camp nearby—walked 4,000 miles south, first to Mongolia, then across the Gobi desert without water, and finally over the Himalayas (where they encountered what appeared to be a pair of yetis) into India.

Think it all seems a bit over the top? You’re not alone. The book has been attacked by skeptics since it was originally published in the 1950s. In 1996, a BBC journalist investigated Rawicz’s story and found wartime Soviet documents that seemed to prove his tale was a hoax.

Witold Glinski

In May 2009, Witold Glinski, a Polish veteran of World War II living in Britain, came forward to claim that The Long Walk was true—only it had happened to him, not Rawicz. To shed more light on the mystery, Armchair Adventurista contacted Tomasz Grzywaczewski, a Polish explorer who is part of a team of adventurers currently retracing the route of The Long Walk. Grzywaczewski, who interviewed Witold Glinski on television in England and saw documents confirming the existence of “Mr. Smith,” the American member of the group of escapees, is “strongly convinced” that Glinski is telling the truth.

The fact remains that Poles and others incarcerated in Siberia escaped and journeyed thousands of perilous miles to freedom. With his book, Rawicz succeeded in shining a light on the atrocities suffered by his people during a dark chapter in history. Watch for a movie based on the book (The Way Back, starring Colin Farrell and Ed Harris) later this year.

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