Sławomir Rawicz

The Long Walk sold in the hundreds of thousands on the strength of its subtitle, which promised a true story: seven men escaping a Siberian labour camp in 1941 and walking four thousand miles south through the Gobi and over the Himalayas into India. Sławomir Rawicz, a Polish cavalry officer born in 1915, told it to the journalist Ronald Downing, who wrote it up for publication in 1956. The claim did not survive the archives. Soviet records released decades later show Rawicz was let out under the 1942 amnesty for Polish citizens and travelled to Iran, not over the mountains. In 2009 another Pole, Witold Gliński, said the journey had been his and that Rawicz had taken it from a debriefing file. Rawicz, who died in Nottingham in 2004, never withdrew the account. Peter Weir filmed it in 2010 as The Way Back, billed as inspired by real events rather than a record of them.