I’m curently engrossed in reading Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, and I can already heartily recommend it. It is the true story of Rawicz and six other prisoners who escaped a Soviet political prison camp in the Gulag and walked out of Sibera all the way across the Gobi Desert, though the Himalayas, into India. I’m almost halfway through the book now.
Life in the Gulag Archipelago, as Solzhenitsyn similarly described in his Nobel Prize-winning book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was brutal enough, but thoughts of an escape over such terrain made most men in the camps shudder to think about it. Rawicz did it, and lived!