Peter Weir's Film..."The Way Back"

If you google Sławomir Rawicz (1915 – 2004), dear readers, you will learn that he was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the Soviets after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland during WWII. In a ghost-written book called Walk, he claimed that in 1941 he and six others escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp and walked over 6,500 km (4,000 mi) south, through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas to finally reach British India in the winter of 1942. In 2006, a BBC report based on former Soviet records, including "statements" allegedly written by Rawicz himself, showed 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. Whether the story is true or fiction is irrelevant. I read Rawicz' book in 2005, 50 years after its publication. It was so starkly horrifying in its detailed portrayal of the Soviet gulags and their effect on the human spirit that I had to get through it in small doses over long months. After the gulag, Rawicz recounts the escape and heroic march from Siberia to India, which has its separate horrors of physical and psychological suffering. This evening I stumbled on "The Way Back", a 2010 Peter Weir film about a group of prisoners who escape from a Siberian Gulag camp during World War II. The screenplay by Weir and Keith Clarke, is inspired by the Rawicz book. It stars Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell and Ed Harris. Peter Weir captures the tone and style of the book so well that 55 years after it appeared and 10 years after I read it, I still had to turn away from some of the scenes. The band of escapees embody a besieged and battered humanity that flee their tormenters rather than die in the gulag, even though the chance of survival is nil. “Nature is your jailer, and she is without mercy,” the guard tells a group arriving at the gulag. Wikipedia describes it : "...the unspeakable conditions, the grime, haunted faces, violent outbursts and eerie lighting — along with the startling contrast between the splendor of the natural surroundings and the ugliness of the camp — makes this place of death come alive..." Peter Weir has once again created a microcosm that reveals the vileness of debased human beings being ground into non-existence by the soaring indomitability of the human spirit. Weir is the master of the quiet human victory over the tragedy of evil. "The Way Back" is the latest example of his lifelong hymn to human dignity and invincibility. Read tbe book. Watch the film. You will be a more complete person for having done it.