‘The Long Walk’ an epic journey and a yardstick to measure ourselves against

The Soviets arrest a young Polish cavalry officer in November 1939 as Europe erupts in war. The officer endures ghastly torture at Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison, then faces one of Stalin’s ‘‘show trials,’’ and is sentenced to 25 years of forced labor for the ‘‘crime’’ of having lived too close to the Polish-Russian border, thus probably being a spy.

The officer is thrown into the maw of the Soviet gulag, packed with other prisoners into a freezing cattle car where there is no room even to sit down, then, weeks later, when the train can go no farther, forced to walk hundreds of miles through the Siberian winter, chained in a long line of fellow misfortunates. The weak, the out-of-shape and the old cannot endure the march, and their bodies are left alongside the track as so much garbage, unburied and stripped bare.

The destination is a penal camp a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. The journey from Lubyanka began in mid-November; those who survive trudge into the camp at the end of January. They have lived through three blizzards, out in the cold, without shelter.

The Polish officer realizes that he will die, from starvation, hard labor or execution, long before he can serve out his sentence. He decides to try to escape. If the dogs and guards don’t kill him, Siberia itself will. But he feels he has no choice.

Months later, the officer does escape, along with six other men willing to risk execution if detected by camp guards. The seven run for their lives, poorly clad, with little more provisions than some dried husks of bread saved for weeks from their starvation rations, and a few animal pelts stolen from the Soviet guards.

The escapees’ goal — British-held India, some 4,000 miles away, where they would be safe from recapture.

Sound like a movie plot? It is, but more on that later.

The name of the young cavalry officer was Slavomir Rawicz, and he told his amazing story in the 1956 book "The Long Walk," which he dictated to British journalist Ronald Downing. The book was reprinted in 2010 by Lyons Press.

The seven, joined for a time by a young woman also fleeing the Soviets, undertake an incredible journey. They must cross icy rivers and barren, desolate lands, all the while eluding capture. They go days without food or water. Death stalks them, waiting to pick off the weak or the careless.

The yearlong journey takes them down from icy Siberia, into China, across the burning Gobi Desert, into Tibet, through the Himalayas and on into India.

And so some Indian soldiers, out drilling on a balmy spring day, happen upon a little group of skeletal, ragged, lice-infected, wild-looking men, skin turned to leather, hair and beards long, matted and foul — who upon realizing where they are erupt screaming and dancing, and then collapse in tears.

In the years since Rawicz described his amazing journey, critics have raised doubts about the plausibility of the story. The Soviets, for example, alleged that Rawicz had been imprisoned for killing an officer of the NKVD, the early version of the KGB, the Soviet spy agency. The Soviets also say, and have produced records to the effect, that they freed Rawicz in 1941 so he couldn’t have escaped as he claimed.

Others question whether men could have accomplished such an arduous journey, through one of the world’s most pitiless deserts and through some of Earth’s highest mountains, and especially when those men had been brutalized beforehand by the Soviet gulag.

The consensus, after years of scrutiny seems to be this: Rawicz’s story probably is mostly true. It might have been embellished a bit by his English scribe, Downing. There is no doubt that the Polish officer endured torment — he was haunted for the rest of his life by nightmares, and on occasions when he attempted to tell his story, many times he dissolved in tears. Today we would recognize his symptoms as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Secondly, the Soviets had plenty of reasons to lie, given the barbarity of that regime. (By various estimates, the Soviets under Joseph Stalin executed 1 million people, deported at least 9.5 million, at least 5 million of them to the gulag, many never to return, and starved up to 14.5 million — numbers that numb the mind.)

And third, World War II saw heretofore unheard of upheavals of populations, with refugees, ex-detainees and others wandering afoot across Europe, attempting to return home or to get as far as possible from their personal experience of hell on earth.

In any case, Rawicz’s story is an epic tale of courage, survival, triumph over evil — and, ultimately, of human kindness, because that in the end is what saved the little band of forlorn travelers. The story is haunting — one rips along, flipping page after page, wanting to know if the men survived.

But later, when not occupied by the cares of the day, or stewing over some hill-of-beans situation that has one fuming, the thought comes: How would I have done? Would I have survived? Would I be willing to walk 4,000 miles, starving, to be free? Would I be able? What is the content of my character?

No wonder the story inspired a movie, "The Way Back," which was released in January. The film stars Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Saoirse Ronan and Colin Farrell.