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Sławomir Rawicz (1 September 1915 – 5 April 2004) was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the NKVD after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. In a ghost-written book called ''The Long Walk'', he claimed that in 1941 he and six others had escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp and began a long journey south on foot (about ). They travelled through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas to finally reach British India in the winter of 1942. In 2006 the BBC released a report based on former Soviet records, including statements written by Rawicz himself, showing that Rawicz had been released as part of the 1942 general amnesty of Poles in the USSR and subsequently transported across the Caspian Sea to a refugee camp in Iran, and that his escape to India never occurred. In May 2009, Witold Gliński, a Polish WWII veteran living in the UK, came forward to claim that the story of Rawicz was true, but was actually an account of what happened to him, not Rawicz. Gliński's claims have been questioned by various sources.〔(Скрадзенае жыццё Вітальда Глінскага ) 〕 Rupert Mayne, a British intelligence officer in wartime India, claimed to his son to have interviewed three emaciated men in Calcutta in 1942, who claimed to have escaped from Siberia. According to his son, Mayne always believed their story was the same as that of ''The Long Walk''—but telling the story decades later, his son could not remember their names or any details.〔(Hugh Levinson, "Walking the talk?" Monday, 30 October 2006, BBC News, UK )〕 ==Early life and army career== Sławomir Rawicz was born on 1 September 1915 in Warsaw, the son of a landowner. He received private primary education and went on to study architecture in 1932. In 1937 he joined the Polish Army Reserve and underwent the cadet officer school. In July 1939 he married Vera, his first wife. She went missing during WWII. According to his account, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union defeated Poland, Rawicz returned home, where the NKVD arrested him on 19 November 1939. He was taken to Minsk, then sent to Kharkov for interrogation, then to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was put on rigged trial. He was tortured to make him confess to being a spy which initially was unsuccessful. He was sentenced to 25 years of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp, ostensibly for espionage as were thousands of others. Researchers for the BBC Radio program ''The Long Walk'' in 2006 unearthed documents indicating that the charge against Rawicz might have been for killing, in the defence of his country, a Russian NKVD officer.〔(BBC Radio ) "The missing link came through documents discovered by an American researcher, Linda Willis, in Polish and Russian archives. One, in Rawicz's own hand described how he was released from the gulag in 1942, apparently as part of a general amnesty for Polish soldiers. These are backed up by his amnesty document and a permit to travel to rejoin the Polish Army. These papers make it almost impossible to believe that Rawicz escaped, unless there is a case of mistaken identity. However, the name and place and date of birth all match. The documents also show that rather than being imprisoned on trumped-up charges as he claimed, Rawicz was actually sent to the gulag for killing an officer with the NKVD, the forerunner of the Soviet secret police, the KGB."〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sławomir Rawicz」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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