The Way Back - Background

Background

The film is loosely based on The Long Walk, a book by Sławomir Rawicz, depicting his alleged escape from a Siberian gulag and subsequent 4,000-mile walk to freedom in India. Very popular, it sold over 500,000 copies and is credited with inspiring many explorers. In 2006, the BBC unearthed records (including some written by Rawicz himself) that showed that, rather than having escaped from the Gulag, in fact in 1942, he had been released by the USSR. In May 2009, Witold Gliński, a Polish World War II veteran living in the United Kingdom, came forward to claim that Rawicz's story was true but was actually an account of what happened to him, not Rawicz. Glinski's claims also have been seriously questioned. In addition, in 1942, a group of Siberian Gulag escapees is said to have hiked into India. However this too is suspect. Though the director Peter Weir continues to claim that the so-called long walk happened, he himself now describes The Way Back as "essentially a fictional film."

Regardless of whether this particular 'long walk' really took place, during World War II other Poles undertook difficult journeys attempting to leave the Soviet Union. Accounts of their escapes can be found in the archives of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, England, and in the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, in California. Also, several relatively verifiable and believable escapee autobiographies have been published in English, e.g. Michael Krupa's Shallow Graves in Siberia.