Could you walk away from this? (The Long Walk - Slavomir Rawicz)

Member Name: mcrouch

Product:	The Long Walk - Slavomir Rawicz
Date:	04/08/01 (647 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very readable, packed with tension and emotion, life-affirming

Disadvantages: none

Imagine that you are standing upright in the bottom of a very, very tall chimney. Far up at the top is a small slot allowing in a small sliver of daylight. You are pinned up against the sides of the chimney because it is not big enough to move around in. In front of you, a foot up from the floor is a door. The door is closed. You are cold, very hungry and thirsty. And you have been there for the best part of 24 hours. Every day for weeks. Months even.

Every day for an hour or so the door opens and a Russian soldier pulls you out. You are taken into an office where you stand in front of a small group of stone-faced officials. They bark questions at you, the same questions every day. Who are you? What is your rank? What is your profession? What are you doing in Russia? And then having given them the same answers, you are returned to the chimney to await the same fate tomorrow.

All of this hardly bears thinking about. Endless days of mental and physical torture for no apparent reason. And often other barbaric forms of physical torture were inflicted. In the end, a signed confession under the influence of drugs is the only way these torturers could be satisfied. The Long Walk begins with a disturbing aacount of a Polish Cavalry officer's experience at the hands of the Russians at the outbreak of World War 2.

I was alerted to this book by a fellow dooyoo-er whose opinion is also listed here. I will try not to repeat what has already been said but to give you some impression of what I thought of the book.

It is an amazing account, vividly recalled but somehow almost impossible to comprehend. The experiences of this man, Slavomir Ravitz, and others like him, certainly puts many of our own experiences into some perspective. I'm not sure I could have endured what this man went through, and indeed, many did not.

But Ravitz's experience did not end there. After a few months of this torture, he was
sentenced to 25 years hard labour in a Siberian concentration camp. But the march there through bitter cold, snow and rain over harsh landscapes, chained to many others in the same position with only minimal clothing and little food, becomes an even greater test of endurance than his former incarceration. Once at their destination, these same prisoners had to build their own accomodation blocks to live in.

The book has many stories to tell, building up to the moment of the great escape. Months of travelling in hostile conditions, against unknown enemies to the safety of far-off lands. They meet friends on the way, pick up a Polish girl whose own life has been every bit as harsh and traumatic as the authors' and dance with danger on numerous occasions.

Despite some of the tortures and horendous experiences recounted, especially at the beginning, I found this a very easy book to read. It conjures up images so vividly you can almost imagine being in the author's shoes, not that any of us would really want to be. It is also, I found, a tremendouly life-affirming book. It shows the power of friendship and teamwork, of the sheer scale of human endurance against the most insurmountable odds. The only disappointing aspects of the book are the loose ends, the stories of those we have come across, who played their part but of whom we never learn what happened. For example, the camp commander's wife whose role was vital and of the farmer denied his gun upon whose livelihood stood.

But we are rewarded with many beautiful little tales, my favourite of which was about the strange violin sounds being heard in the forest one day. Our group of escapees, not long flown from the coup, circle around and draw nearer to the sound of a string being plucked. And there in the middle of the forest in Siberia, stands a large black bear. It towers over the remains of a blasted tree, a single long piece of trunk running from the base up to the
bears arm. With its opposite paw, it plucks it like a violin string, fascinated by the sound it is making. After some time, the bear grows bored of his music-making ability and departs. When the escapees have a go, they find that even with their combined strength, they are unable to bend the remains of the tree trunk.

This is a very affecting book and one which I cannot recommend highly enough.

Summary: