The Long Walk

In addition to Leepike Ridge, I also finished The Great Gatsby (with which I was not especially impressed, and therefore will not review!) as well as The Long Walk.

The Long Walk is a poignant tale of WWII, detailing one Polish man's journey - a harrowing ordeal of unjustified imprisonment by the Russians, his experience in and finally his escape from a labor camp in Siberia. The scope of gut-wrenching tribulations this man endured is almost unbelievable at times, and his determination to survive in the midst of cruelty and inconceivable hardship is astonishing. Though not a "pleasant" read, the author's voice is surprisingly devoid of bitterness and even rings with hope.

One of the most memorable scenes occured as the men were walking, chained behind a truck, 3000 miles through the vast, frozen Siberian wilderness toward their labor camp near the Arctic Circle. Most of these men had already undergone various degrees of torture and humiliation, sub-zero rides in packed train cars, and were near starvation:

"Somehow someone learned during the second week of the march that it was 24 December. The news went up and down the long, struggling line like the leaping flames of a forest fire. 'It's Christmas Eve,' went the whisper from man to man. Away back behind us there was suddenly a thin, wavering sound. It was odd and startling. It grew in volume and swept towards us. It was the sound of men singing, men singing with increasing power in the wastes of the Siberian wilderness. The mounting song reached us unchecked and engulged us. I was singing and Grechinen was singing. Everybody who had a voice left was joining in. A marching choir of nearly five thousand male voices drowning their despair in a song of praise for the Child who would be born on the morrow."

Of the "older" men who worked beside him in the camp (men in their 40's-50's...he was 25 at the time) the author writes: "...[they] fought to stay young, to work, to live, the men who had lived leisured lives and now, marvellously, displayed the guts to face a cruel new life very bravely. They should have been telling tales to their grandchildren, these oldsters. Instead they spent their day straining and lifting at the great fallen trees, working alongside men who were often half their age. There is a courage which flourishes in the worst kind of adversity and it is quite unspectacular. These men had it in full."

When those who survive the journey finally reach India - after crossing Siberia, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas - they realize, "'We are safe...we are safe...We shall be able to live again.' I thought a little about that. It sounded a wonderful thing to say. All that misery, all that sorrow, the hardship of a whole year afoot, so that we might live again."