Sławomir Rawicz

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 German-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 began a long journey south on foot (about 6,500 km or 4,000 mi). They travelled through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas to finally reach British India in the winter of 1942. 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, and that his 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 questioned by various sources.

Rupert Mayne, a British intelligence officer in wartime India, claimed to his son to have interviewed three emaciated men in Calcutta in 1942, who claimed to have escaped from Siberia. According to his son, Mayne always believed 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.

Sławomir Rawicz was born on 1 September 1915 in Warsaw, the son of a landowner. He received private primary education and went on to study architecture in 1932. In 1937 he joined the Polish Army Reserve and underwent the cadet officer school. In July 1939 he married Vera, his first wife. She went missing during World War II.

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