Peter Weir produced a film version of the story entitled “The Way Back.” Using actual film footage from Soviet archives, he shows starving prisoners fighting for garbage, playing cards for each others’ few belongings, burying their clothes in snow to kill the lice. They take comfort in the fact that he died a free man. On their first night one of the men, Kazik, goes off in search of firewood and freezes to death. Only the knowledge that they cannot go back, and the goal of freedom, keep them going. A blinding snowstorm gives them cover, but once free of the camp, in desperate need of food, clothing, and shelter, they face the sheer impossibility of what they are attempting to do. Janusz is chained to a group of convicts and marched to a Siberian prison from which there is no escape. An instant best seller, the book tells the story of a Polish cavalry officer, Janusz, captured by the Russians, tortured, and sentenced to 25 years hard labor in a prison camp in Siberia. Slavomir Rawicz recounts the story in his memoir, “The Long Walk,” published in 1956. Yet there is evidence that a group of prisoners did just that. To escape from a Soviet gulag in 1941 and walk across Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi desert, the Himalayas, to British-controlled India, a distance of four thousand miles, is an impossible feat.
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