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Long Walk? Did It Not Describe A Meeting With Two Yetis

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Dessie32

Gone But Not Forgotten
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I remember at school a book about an escaped polish prisoner from a German POW or concentration camp. The book went into detail of his journey and his encounter with 2 yeti type creatures. This book was critically acclaimed for years. But I have never heard or seen any reference to it in publications or websites for years.

I think John Green mentioned it in one of his books and cast doubts on the encounter. Did this scare publishers away? Did the book turn out to be a load of bunkum in the end?
 
Was the book called 'As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me'?

I read that as a teenager.
As I remember, it was a German soldier who escaped from POW camp in Russia. I do remember the Yeti incident in that book. :shock:
 
There is a list of documented encounters here. I don't think the one you mention is listed but I've no idea how exhaustive or accurate the list is.
 
:eek:
Wow, both those books have yeti encounters? And, even more of the same sort of thing, there was a story (from Peter Haining's Ancient Mysteries among other books) of an "almas" or yeti-type creature shot as a deserter by the Red Army during WW2.
Maybe some of the creatures in these reports might have been literal "wild men", that is feral humans, there were lots of extremely violent social upheavals in the decades before WW2 that might have caused many children to be abandoned or lost during flight, maybe some of them managed to survive in the wild for a time.
:?
 
The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz - not sure if it's been debunked :). It seems an odd thing to just invent and stick in a story about escape from a POW camp, though.
 
stu neville said:
The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz - not sure if it's been debunked :). It seems an odd thing to just invent and stick in a story about escape from a POW camp, though.
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Did this story get mixed up with "Seven Years in Tibet?" :lol:
 
It's a great book. And such a remarkable story, that there was really no need to insert a yeti sighting for effect, which is why I found it so convincing. I have read somewhere on here that it was debunked, not sure if that was just the Yetis, or the whole thing.
 
The debunking that I remember was done by John Napier (can't remember the name of the book). He pointed out some inaccurracies in the description of the landscape or something like that. There have been quite a few yeti (or more probably almas due to the locations) from escaped prisoners during the war. But there does seem to be some variations. Some seem to be Bigfoot type while others seem to be more neanderthal. In Myra Shackley's book the picture of one captured almas looks too primative to be a neanderthal. Could the eye witness be influenced by pictures they may have seen prior to their sightings.
 
Could the eye witness be influenced by pictures they may have seen prior to their sightings.(end quote) No.Dessie. They are out there , and most folks see different kinds of homonids running around-some folks up in the hills in places in the usa (and swamps) feed them and know them real good-
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Not sure if this was the book but i remember a storey about a guy who wokeup at a yeti "camp" of some type. I remember only a couple things from it. one was that he played dead as they were holding onto him because he was unsure of their intents. Geez i dont remember what else. Does this sound familiar anyone?
 
Yes, that's the Albert Ostman case:

The year 1924 turned out to be a banner year in Bigfoot history. Three major sightings occurred: According to a Canadian lumberjack named Albert Ostman, he had been prospecting near Tobet Inlet when he was captured by a family of Bigfoots. The father and daughter guarded him while the mother and son prepared the meals. The family was vegetarian and ate roots, grass and spruce tips. After about a week Ostman was able to slip away. He didn't tell his story to anyone till 1957, fearing people would think him crazy.
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http://www.inthegorge.com/bigfoot.html
 
Where can I find a copy of this photo of an Almas that Myra Shackley took?
 
IIRC it was in Shackley's "Wildmen" - I had a copy of it in the mid 80s, but have since managed to lose it (along with Bigfoot by Napier and the Bigfoot Casebook by J and C Bord, both of which are on Amazon starting at about £25 used :()..
 
At one point a few years ago, 'The Long Walk' was announced by Fox as a big-budget summer vehicle for George Clooney. From what I understood, the project has been shelved indefinitely, but I wondered at the time whether they would include the yeti/almas encounter in the film, or if they would just pretend it wasn't a part of the book's narrative.
 
Unfortunately, the pinch of salt element has recently increased somewhat :(.

Walking the talk?

By Hugh Levinson
Producer, BBC Radio 4's The Long Walk

An epic story of human endurance is being challenged. Did wartime prisoners really walk from Siberia to India?

In 1956, a Polish man living in the English midlands published an extraordinary book that became one of the classic tales of escape and endurance.

In The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz described how, during the Second World War, he and a group of prisoners broke out of a gulag in the Soviet Union in 1941. They walked thousands of miles south from Siberia, through Mongolia, Tibet, across the Himalayas, to the safety of British India.

The only question is: is it true? From the start, a ferocious controversy has raged about whether anyone really could achieve this superhuman feat. Critics particularly questioned one chapter in the book where the walkers apparently see a pair of yetis.....

....Rawicz himself could never produce a single piece of evidence to support his story.

So now, 50 years on, I set out in a BBC Radio 4 documentary to investigate the claims. I sent out enquiries to contacts in Poland, America, Lithuania, Finland, Latvia, Sweden and elsewhere. We sent out enquiries to Rawicz's old school, to the Polish military archives and to the Ministry of Defence.

The programme's presenter, Tim Whewell, travelled to Moscow to see if he could find any records of Rawicz's imprisonment in the gulag files - but there was no mention there.

Then our first breakthrough came from an unlikely source - an archive in Belarus, the most closed country in Europe. They sent us a package of documents which shed amazing detail on Rawicz's pre-war life.

There were official documents he had filled out as a young man, which tell us a lot about his family and his background. But they couldn't confirm his arrest, or his escape.

Our next find came at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, a treasure trove of Second World War memorabilia.

We found Rawicz's military record, which clearly says he had rejoined the Polish Army in Russia. We wondered how this could possibly fit with the story of The Long Walk.

The missing link came through documents discovered by an American researcher, Linda Willis, in Polish and Russian archives. One, in Rawicz's own hand described how he was released from the gulag in 1942, apparently as part of a general amnesty for Polish soldiers. These are backed up by his amnesty document and a permit to travel to rejoin the Polish Army.

These papers make it almost impossible to believe that Rawicz escaped, unless there is a case of mistaken identity. However, the name and place and date of birth all match.

The documents also show that rather than being imprisoned on trumped-up charges as he claimed, Rawicz was actually sent to the gulag for killing an officer with the NKVD, the forerunner of the Soviet secret police, the KGB.
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It continues that although it looks less and less likely that Rawicz himself actually did the long walk, the feat itself may well have been accomplished as a British intelligence officer in Calcutta interviewed three men who claimed to have escaped from Siberia.

From our POV though - the Yeti thing was in all probability made up. Which is a shame.
 
escargot1 said:
Was the book called 'As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me'?

I read that as a teenager.
As I remember, it was a German soldier who escaped from POW camp in Russia. I do remember the Yeti incident in that book. :shock:
Click to expand...

i read this book when i was a kid, was just talking about it the other day as well, don't remember a yeti in it, but will definitely have to search for a copy again now.
 
gerhard1 said:
Rupert Furneaux goes into it a bit in his 1961 book The World's Strangest Mysteries. As I recall, it was a couple of paragraphs at most in a chapter on the yeti. As I recall, a small group of Poles held prisoner by the Soviets escaped from a labor camp in Siberia, and went south to India by way of the Himalayas, and reported a few encounters with the creatures.
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The quoted post is from this thread.

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...tness-account-of-mongolian-neanderthal.61429/
 
stu neville said:
The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz - not sure if it's been debunked.
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Maybe, maybe not ... There's documentary evidence that contradicts Rawicz's story of his WW2-era travels and trials. In addition, there's at least one other Polish POW / political prisoner survivor (one Witold Gliński) who claimed he was the one whose epic escape is described in The Long Walk.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sławomir_Rawicz

See Also:

The Long Walk, did it ever happen?
https://www.explorersweb.com/trek/news.php?id=19859

The Long Walk: A True Story of a Trek to Freedom?
http://dave-anderson.com/the-long-walk/
 
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