The Long Walk-31

The story told in this book was rather unbelievable, but it is supposed to be true.


The book tells the story of how the author was arrested, tortured, deported to a Russian labor camp, and of how he escaped the Russian labor camp he was imprisoned in. The whole ordeal seems unbelievable, it is hard to imagine how anybody could suffer through it and survive. Personally I think I would have died at the torture part, the things the author suffered through were brutal. I'm not so sure how badly the isolation part of the torture would affect me, I usually prefer to be alone, but the beatings and other methods of torture would likely drive me insane before too long.

Assuming I survived the months of torture and the mockery of a trial, next up would be the deporting to the labor camp. I think that if I had made it past the torture then that part probably wouldn't finish me off. According to the author the young and healthy men were taken care off during the journey, at least more so than the other prisoners. I'm young and healthy, so I would most likely survive that. It is still amazing that the author survived though, the conditions were only slightly better than the conditions that a Jew being deported in Germany had to put up with.

Unlike the concentration camps in Germany, the labor camp the author was sent to in Russia was actually not akin to hell on Earth. It was by no means a pleasant place, but if you were willing to work hard you could take care of yourself fairly well. So again I think I could bear it, though with the lack of ways to entertain myself I'd probably be pretty miserable.

The most incredible part of the journey was the escape, the only reason it was feasible to attempt escape was because of the author befreinding the wife of the camp's commander. Even with her help, it wasn't easy to gather a group of people to escape with, and it wasn't easy to gather supplies. Seeing as I'm not so great with people I don't think my journey would progress past this point.

The author did progrees past this point, he escaped, and then he survived the journey back to freindly landss and freedom. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I say that the author being able to do what he did is incredible. I won't go into the details of all the trials he and his group suffered through, but there were many, and most of them seem like things that would be insurmountable to the average person.

After reading this, I am forced to wonder what exactly drove these men to survive the thigns they did. None of them were anything out of the ordinary, but they did things that ordinary people would be to terrified to even try. Whatever it was that drove them I don't know, but it is certainly interesting.

The last thing I'll say on this post is something that both the author and myself found to be ironic. In the labor camp prisoners could earn larger rations by performing different jobs. At the same time the officials in the camp were trying to convert all the prisoners to communism, the system that is supposed to eliminate barriers between people and make it so that everyone gets the same treatment. The contridiction was quite amusing in my opinion.

Time for me to wrap it up now, so until next time, farewell!