Each has its own strengths, its own unforgettable scenes, its own moral dilemmas. The film is different from the book, as you might expect. Not all of the remaining six make it to India. A girl named Irene joins them for a time. There’s an an accountant, a pastry chef/sketch artist, and a priest. Ed Harris is the American subway worker caught in the Great Terror of 1937, Colin Ferrell a Russian thug.
In the Gobi desert they battle sandstorms, sunstroke, and dehydration, supporting those who falter, always moving southward toward freedom. At one point they fight off a group of wolves for the carcass of an animal. Yet their need for clothing and food is constant. They must leave no mark of their passing, for fear of being captured and sent back. No one has ever walked through Mongolia, yet these men do it, doggedly putting one foot after the other. Peter Weir produced a film version of the story entitled “The Way Back.” Using actual film footage from Soviet archives, he shows starving prisoners fighting for garbage, playing cards for each others’ few belongings, burying their clothes in snow to kill the lice. They take comfort in the fact that he died a free man. On their first night one of the men, Kazik, goes off in search of firewood and freezes to death. Only the knowledge that they cannot go back, and the goal of freedom, keep them going. A blinding snowstorm gives them cover, but once free of the camp, in desperate need of food, clothing, and shelter, they face the sheer impossibility of what they are attempting to do. Janusz is chained to a group of convicts and marched to a Siberian prison from which there is no escape. An instant best seller, the book tells the story of a Polish cavalry officer, Janusz, captured by the Russians, tortured, and sentenced to 25 years hard labor in a prison camp in Siberia. Slavomir Rawicz recounts the story in his memoir, “The Long Walk,” published in 1956. Yet there is evidence that a group of prisoners did just that. To escape from a Soviet gulag in 1941 and walk across Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi desert, the Himalayas, to British-controlled India, a distance of four thousand miles, is an impossible feat.
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