Today while visiting a thrift store in my area in search of odd books, I found a copy of The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. The book itself doesn’t focus on the anomalous, instead dealing primarily with the story of Rawicz, who at the time had been a prisoner who escaped with a small group of men from a Soviet prison camp in 1941. In order to make it to freedom, those who survived the ordeal were forced to travel out of Siberia and across China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, finally traversing the Himilayas into British India.

I recognized the book instantly, having heard about it before in various cryptozoological circles. Interestingly, one of the final chapters of the book is called “Strange Creatures”, and deals with a sighting of two Yeti during the men’s trek across the Himilayas. Having initially spotted them from a distance, Rawicz and his company had believed these might be bears or some other animals they might use for food. However, upon nearing their potential prey, they began to realize these weren’t any creatures they had ever seen before. Rawicz’s account of the strange sighting reads as follows:

“Two points struck me immediately. They were enormous and they walked on their hind legs. The picture is clear in my mind, stuck there indelibly by a solid two hours of observation. We just could not believe what we saw at first, so we stayed to watch… I set myself to estimating their height on the basis of my military training for artillery observation. They could not have been much less than eight feet tall. One was a few inches taller than the other, in the relation of the average man to the average woman. They were shuffling quietly round on a flattish shelf  which formed part of the obvious route for us to continue our descent. We thought that if we waited long enough they would go away and leave the way clear for us. It was obvious they had seen us, and equally apparent they had no fear of us.” 

This has been cited various times in the past as a World War II era sighting of Yeti creatures in the Himilayas. Indeed, it is hard to discount the fascination Rawicz’z story, particularly this portion of it, inspires in the mind of the reader. However, over the years various source material has been provided that suggests that Rawicz never actually made the trek described in The Long Walk, instead having borrowed the story from official documents he found elsewhere.

According to Rawicz’s testimony, he claimed to have moved from India to Iraq after the journey described in his book. He was then said to have re-entered the Soviet Union in of June 1942, rejoining the Polish Army the following month. Finally, he claimed to have also at some point returned to Iraq with Polish troops, then moved to Palestine, where a period of recovery elapsed, after which he found himself teaching in a military school. However, army records indicate without question that Slavomir Rawicz moved from the Soviet Union directly to Iran in 1942; only after this did he relocate to Palestine. Rawicz’s claims of the journey he and others with him made to India, on the other hand, is not supported by any info other than that produced by Rawicz himself.

But does this indicate that the story is a fabrication altogether? Not necessarily… in all likelihood, Rawicz read the account while examining papers he found in the Polish Embassy in London during the war, and later dictated the story to ghostwriter Ronald Downing as his own sometime in the 1950s; at which time, thanks to the work of researchers like Ivan T. Sanderson, reports of “ABSM’s” (Abominable Snowmen) were beginning to be widely reported. Though the entire story of Rawicz’s escape had begun to be suspected of falsehood by various parties, the true source of the story (according to this article) was later related by Witold Glinski, who at the time had been a Polish teenager living near Glabokia, and was arrested with his family by invading Russians in 1939.

Glinski says he was separated from his parents and taken to Moscow’s notorious Lubianka Prison, where he was sentenced to 25 years hard labour. On average, ten to fifteen percent of those brought to the camp died in the process, prompting Glinski to make the difficult decision to either wait to die, or try to get away. Witold said he had begun plotting his escape as soon as he arrived, though shackled in chains. The rest of the story is nearly word-for-word what transpires in The Long Walk, though in Glinski’s “official” version of the story, there appears to be no recollection of the portion dealing with a sighting of two Yeti creatures.

However, in a 2008 article appearing at the website Blog Critics featuring a review of Rawicz’s book, a variety comments from readers appeared noting interest in the supposed encounter. Comment number thirteen, posted by an individual identified only as “S. Rawicz”, claimed to be the grandchild of the book’s author, and shared the following regarding the report:

“Yes there are things that are uncertain, but there are also facts that do support him in what he wrote, but one person’s say so is no better than anyone else’s… I hear stories about this and that, and even to ourselves there is so much to ask, and to ask is all there is for us all. I’d love nothing more than to be able to prove or deny theories or allegations surrounding my Granddad and what he wrote, just to know that people will leave the memory of my granddad alone and treat him the respect he deserves… Just because I can’t find something though doesn’t mean it isn’t there, or doesn’t exist, and likewise something that I read or hear about doesn’t make it any more realistic or possible, something that our generation should appreciate more so than older generations.”

More specifically having to do with Yeti creatures, the following was shared:

By way of example, I was brought up in an era where in the news the possibility that the moon could have Martians existed, Pluto was a Planet, there was no water on Mars and that the Yeti couldn’t exist, yet here I am knowing that Pluto is a rock, there are no little green men, and that there actually is water on Mars, also this week scientists claim to have discovered hair from a creature in the foothills of China that have turned out to be from a creature that we haven’t classified yet, so what does that tell us…

Indeed, contrary to what some have asserted, the portions of the story dealing with Yetis may not be cause for blanketing the entire ordeal as a fabrication. Still, the details regarding specifically the sighting of the two Yeti creatures seems to be more difficult to justify, also. Regardless, the book is a fascinating read, and will likely remain an item of interest in the collections of cryptozoology circles.