"One of the most amazing, heroic stories of this or any other time."
--Chicago Tribune

"It is a book filled with the spirit of human dignity and the courage of men seeking
freedom."--Los Angeles Times

"Positively Homeric."--Times (London)

Twenty-six-year-old cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army
in 1939 during the German-Soviet partition of Poland and sent to the Siberian Gulag.
In the spring of 1941, he escaped with six of his fellow prisoners, including one
American. Thus began their astonishing trek to freedom.

With no map or compass but only an ax head, a homemade knife, and a week's supply
of food, the compatriots spent a year making their way on foot to British India, through
four thousand miles of the most forbidding terrain on earth. They braved the Himalayas,
the desolate Siberian tundra, icy rivers, and the great Gobi Desert, always a hair's
breadth from death. Finally arriving, Rawicz reenlisted in the Polish army to fight the
Germans.