Four years ago I read the book The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawciz. In it he detailed the course his life took after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, followed shortly afterwards by the Soviet Union. After the surrender, he returned from fighting the Germans to his wife, who lived in the Russian zone, where he was siezed by the NKVD and eventually sent to Siberia for the then standard twenty five years. Considering that thousands of Polish officers were murdered at Katyn by the NKVD, he could be described as lucky; or perhaps not.

However, in the spring of 1941 he managed to escape from the labour camp near Yakutsk that he was held in, and with six (and later seven) companions he walked south across Siberia, skirting Lake Baikal, then across Mongolia and the Gobi desert, across Tibet and finally crossed the Himilayas to what was then British India. Half his companions died in the year it took for them to walk there, but four men did make it; a tremendous achievement.

For reasons of politics and money, I was not able to duplicate his full journey, in particular to visit northern Siberia, the crossing of the Gobi desert, and the full crossing of the Himilayas. However, I saw enough to satisfy myself that I understood the book far better than when I started.

Of course, the story is not yet finished, as those who perpetrated the worst reign of terror in the last thousand years largely got away with their crimes; hardly surprising, as most of those who would appoint themselves guardians of our "rights" spent the Cold War denegrating democracies and making excuses for those very same criminals. I suspect that when it comes to "justice" we, and those forgotten millions, will have to wait for a higher authority to pronounce sentence.

Rupert Fiennes, April 1998
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