Free The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz

on the long road from Pinsk to Northern Siberia. I struggle sometimes to remember in sharp detail some of my experiences but small incidents concerning food come back to me clearly
and unbidden. There was never enough of it and the thought of it nagged at us always. Men would have given a handful of diamonds for an extra slice of bread in these circumstances and counted
themselves the most fortunate of beings, because only food had value. It was beyond price.
    We were hit by three tearing blizzards in the course of our march. The first one, which struck towards the end of the first week was the worst because it was our first experience of the full
fury of one of these freezing, high-velocity winds hurling with it a concentrated, driving weight of snow. The sky had been heavy, the clouds low and lead-grey, when we got under way soon after
dawn, and the blizzard shrieked down on us about two hours later. It slowed the convoy almost immediately until we were creeping along, heads well down, at only a slow shuffle. It was almost
impossible to open the eyes to it. The snow packed on our matted hair and beards, coated the lorries and the taut chains, mantled the soldiers exposed to it ahead and above us, crouched forward
near their whitened machine-gun. The blizzard met us almost head on and its impact was such that I wondered how for the next few hours the leading lorry still succeeded in keeping the convoy
crawling on. We found some kind of comparative shelter about two o’clock. This was the first time I saw the Russians wearing their bashliks, a larger super-type balaclava in a kind of
camel-hair material, the use of which required a special order from the commanding officer.
    The storm blew for the rest of the day and well into the night. We could light no fires while it continued. When it abated before dawn into thin flurries of snow we all, and this must include
the soldiers too, felt at our lowest ebb. At dawn, looking like a collection of snowmen, we turned with desperate hope towards the field kitchen. The mute appeal was answered. The hot coffee came
round. There was a bread issue.
    Little opportunity existed for striking up any kind of friendship with one’s fellow sufferers. Everyone seemed preoccupied with his own troubles, grappling in his own fashion with the
overriding necessity of keeping going. One man, however, I did get to know, because he was my partner on the chain, handcuffed at the same point and abreast of me. He was a young man, thick-legged,
strong and with big, muscled shoulders. It was days before we spoke, although we had been taking stock of each other from the beginning. For my part, I liked what I saw and I think the feeling was
reciprocated on his side. We talked first during an enforced stop to unshackle a dead man from a place on the chain just ahead of us. ‘They won’t kill me like that,’ he said
quietly. ‘Me neither,’ I answered. ‘We’ll get there . . . wherever we’re going.’
    His name, he told me, was Grechinen, and he came from Lublin. He was – although the description is a little too grandiose for the actual job – the stationmaster at a small station
outside Lublin. In fact, he did what work was required almost on his own, including the portering. A boy of modest ambitions, content with his own small sphere of importance, happier working with
his hands than carrying out the modest amount of clerical work that went with the title of stationmaster. The Russians came, and for no logical reason relieved him of his appointment and sent him
to one of the motor transport stations they were setting up to deal with the repair of tractors. Grechinen, born a Ukrainian, was one of those who became Polish in the great Central European
rearrangement of boundaries after the First World War. He was philosophical about his changed occupation. In fact he quite liked ‘messing about with tractors’.
    Some of those tractors, Grechinen told me, were beyond repair, but he