S?awomir Rawicz was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the Russian 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. They endeavored 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 Gli?ski, a Polish WWII 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. Gli?ski's claims have been questioned by various sources. Rupert Mayne, a British intelligence officer in wartime India interviewed three emaciated men in Calcutta in 1942, who claimed to have escaped from Siberia. [More at Wikipedia]

September 1st, 1915 in Pinsk  /  Died:   Apr 5th, 2004