First published in 1956, this is the incredible account of Slavomir Rawicz, a young Polish cavalry officer arrested by the Soviet secret police in 1939 after the Red Army and the Nazis invaded Poland. Sent to Lubyanka prison in Moscow, tortured and forced to confess to spying, Rawicz was marched to a Siberian gulag along with thousands of others. But unlike most, he found the determination and the opportunity to escape, when a blizzard allowed him and six compatriots to slip away. Rawicz describes their harrowing nine-month trek out of Arctic Siberia through China, the Gobi Desert, and over the Himalayas to British India.

"[This] is a book that I absolutely could not put down and one that I will never forget."—Stephen Ambrose