First, according to the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, there was an amnesty document showing that Rawicz had been freed in 1942 (he claimed to have made his escape in 1941) and secondly, Rawicz had written in his own hand that he had been freed and went to Persia, not India. Two key pieces of evidence, researched by the American writer Linda Willis, undermined the truth of Rawicz’s story.
Rawicz, who died in 2004, claimed to have been one of the escapees, but in 2006 a BBC Radio Four documentary exposed Rawicz’s story as fiction. In 1955 a book of that name, written by a former Polish cavalry officer called Slawomir Rawicz, became an international bestseller it later inspired Peter Weir’s 2010 film The Way Back. Whether The Long Walk ever happened at all is disputed, not to mention Glinski’s participation. Witold Glinski claimed to have taken part in the so-called ‘‘Long Walk’’, in which a group of prisoners was said to have escaped from a Second World War Siberian gulag and trekked 4,000 miles to freedom in British India.
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