Finally, there is the curious case of Slavomir Rawicz, whose memoir, The Long Walk, contains the most spectacular and moving description of an escape in all of Gulag literature. According to his account, Rawicz was captured after the Soviet invasion of Poland, and deported to a camp in northern Siberia. He claims to have escaped, with the connivance of a camp commander’s wife, in the company of six other prisoners, one of them an American. Along with a Polish girl, a deportee whom they picked up along the way, they made their way out of the Soviet Union.
During what would have been an extraordinary journey—if it ever took place—they walked around Lake Baikal, over the border into Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, over the Himalayas and Tibet, and into India. Along the way, four of the prisoners died; the rest suffered extremes of privation. Unfortunately, several attempts to verify this story—which bears a distinct resemblance to a Rudyard Kipling short story, “The Man Who Was”—have come to nothing.59 The Long Walk is a superbly told story, even if it never happened. Its convincing realism may well serve as a lesson to all of us who try to write a factual history of escapes from the Gulag.
For, in fact, fantasy about escape played an important part in many prisoners’ lives. Even for the many thousands of prisoners who never would attempt it, the thought of escape—the dream of escape—remained an important psychological prop. A Kolyma survivor told me that “one of the most obvious forms of opposition to the regime was to escape.” Young male prisoners in particular planned, discussed, and argued about the best ways of escape. For some, this discussion itself was a way of fighting the sensation of powerlessness, as Gustav Herling writes:
We would often meet in one of the barracks, an intimate group of Poles, to discuss the details of the plan; we collected scraps of metal found at work, old boxes and fragments of glass which we deluded ourselves could be made into an improvised compass; we gathered information about the surrounding countryside, and the distances, climatic conditions and geographical peculiarities of the north . . .
In the nightmare land to which we had been brought from the West on hundreds of goods trains, every grasp at our own private day-dreams gave us fresh life. After all, if membership of a non-existent terrorist organization can be a crime punished by ten years in a labor camp, then why should a sharpened nail not be a compass-needle, a piece of wood a ski, and a scrap of paper, covered with scribbled dots and lines, a map?
Herling suspects that everyone involved in these discussions believed, deep down, that their preparations were futile. Nevertheless, the exercise served its purpose:
I remember a junior officer of the Polish cavalry who, during the worst periods of hunger in the camp, found enough strength of will to cut a thin slice of bread from his daily ration, dry it over the fire, and save these scraps in a sack which he concealed in some mysterious hiding-place in the barrack. Years later, we met again in the Iraqi desert, and as we recalled prison days over a bottle in an army tent, I made fun of his “plan” of escape. But he answered gravely: “You shouldn’t laugh at that. I survived the camp thanks to hope of escape, and I survived the mortuary thanks to my store of bread. A man can’t live if he doesn’t know what he’s living for.”60
