A Review from the files of Bobbie Short w/commentary
February 2000 - The sketch of the creature is HERE

First published in 1956, the book is an account of a young 26 year old Polish cavalry officer who was arrested by the Russians, tortured and sentenced to 25 years forced labor. The book describes his three month journey from Moscow to the prison camp in Siberia and finally, his escape with 6 companions and their journey across the Gobi desert to Tibet and freedom in 1941. (Note: There is a ‘MAPS Edition’ published later, which I do not have) 

In Daniel Furguson and Angus Hall's 1989 book "Great Mysteries, Mysterious Monsters," there is mention of the story of Lt. Slavomir Rawicz.  In the late 1930’s, Rawicz was a Polish Cavalry lieutenant who, after the 1939 invasion, was arrested and sent to one of the dreaded Siberian labor camps.  He escaped along with six other men in the midst of a worn torn world and walked hundreds of miles out of Siberia, and across Mongolia, the Gobi Desert and over the Himalayas by way of Bhutan and Sikkim with little in the way of supplies. With an inadequate amount of water, hungry, cold and half-starved, they made their incredible escape over the Himalayas to freedom in India.
 
Listed in my database as ‘one of the classic excerpts,’ the saga is best told in Rawicz's best selling book of its day "The Long Walk," a rather thrilling and awe-inspiring journey which expresses man’s spirit and quest for freedom.   Now in reprinted, the newer edition in paperback is selling on www.amazon.com for approximately $14; the hardbound $18.00 and the Audio version for $50.00 U.S. It can also be found USED on www.abebooks.com for anywhere from $6.00 to $85.  If you can afford the audiocassette version, it’s great listening on road trips.

The author, now in his 80’s and living in England wrote that during his 1942 escape from Siberia, he and his companion escapees saw two eight-foot tall yeti-like creatures somewhere between Bhutan and Sikkim.  It is a riveting story of man's will to live free and the determination of a half dozen men to survive against all odds in the raw elements. Their superbly told story is one of courage and human endurance that was interrupted for two hours by an encounter with two hirsute creatures, which sought to block their passageway. Most assuredly, this story bears repeating for it is a would-be classic for followers of this phenomenon. 

Here is that portion of Slavomir Rawicz's story that bears recounting for the current generation of new Sasquatch researchers to process - if for no other reason than to compare Rawicz's observations to present day Bigfoot reports.  The significance of this recount is distinguished by the fact that it is written 25 years before the advent of the Patterson-Gimlin filming of a Sasquatch in Bluff Creek, California. Yet Rawicz’s Bigfoot description bears notice since there was no means for him or his companions to have had prior knowledge of these creatures detailed in “The Long Walk” in 1941-2.  As important an observation as any, here are a few central out-takes from Rawicz's book.

     "The contours of the mountains temporarily hid them from view as we approached nearer, but when we halted on the edge of a bluff we found they were still there, twelve feet or so below us and about 100 yards away. Two points struck me immediately.  They were enormous and they walked on the hind legs. The picture is clear in my mind, fixed there indelibly by a solid two hours of observation. We just could not believe what we saw at first, so we stayed to watch."
 
     "I set myself to estimate their height on the basis of my military training for artillery observations.  They could not have been much less than eight feel tall. One was a few inches taller than the other in the relationship of the average man to the average woman.   They were shuffling quietly around on a flattish shelf, which formed part of the obvious route for us to continue our descent.  We thought that if we waited long enough they would go away and leave the way clear for us."

"It was obvious they had seen us and it was equally apparent they had no fear of us.  The American said that eventually he was sure we would see them drop on all fours like bears.  But they never did.  Their faces I could not see in detail, but the heads were squarish and the ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow.  The shoulders sloped sharply down to a powerful chest.  The arms were long and the wrists reached the level of the knees.  Seen in profile, the back of the head was straight line from the crown into the shoulders, "like a damned Prussian," he wrote.
 
     "We decided unanimously that we were examining a type of creature of which we had no previous experience in the wild, in zoos or in literature.  It would have been easy to see them waddle off at a distance and dismissed them as either bear or big apes of the Orangutan species."  

     "At close range they defied facile [simplistic] description. There was something both of the bear and the ape about the general shape, but they could not be mistaken for either.  The color was a rusty kind of brown.  They appeared to be covered by two distinct kinds of hair - -the reddish hair which gave them their characteristic color forming a tight close fur against the body, mingling with which were long loose straight hairs hanging downwards, which had a slight grayish tinge as the light caught them. They were doing nothing but moving around slowly together, occasionally stopping to look around them like people admiring a view.  Their heads turned towards us now and again but their interest in us seemed to be of the slightest. I looked back and the pair was standing still, arms swinging slightly as though listening intently."  "What were they?   

“For years they remained a mystery to me, but since I have recently read of scientific expeditions to discover the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and studied descriptions of the creature given to me by native hill men.  I believe that on that day we may have encountered two of the animals.  I do insist, however that recent estimates of their height as about 5 feet must be wrong.  The minimum height of a well grown specimen must be around seven feet."

According to John Napier's review of the Rawicz book, several varying points were added to the above description of the beasts they encountered. The reasons for the additional commentary were unclear.  According to Napier, Rawicz was alleged to have remarked on the presence of buttocks, short legs and rather surprisingly a rounded chin and rather conical shaped head.  It is difficult to understand how four such important points were omitted from the original text descriptions, unless Napier interviewed Rawicz.

In my chat with Rawicz in 2000, he could not recall any conversation with Napier, but clearly recalled the rudeness and ungentlemanly behavior of Eric Shipton…calling him “an arrogant chap.”
 
To be clear, Napier wrote his version of the remarkable observations saying:  "Unfortunately they complicate the issue even further because two of them, (buttocks and a chin) are not apelike but human characteristics, a conical head and short legs are ape-like. Slavomir Rawicz also mentions how the creatures stamped and swayed when moving about, a description that evokes the locomotion patterns of neither man nor ape.”   Sounds like the pongid verses the homin campaign was enforce more than thirty years ago by Napier but not by Rawicz and company.
 
Today, with highly detailed digital image analysis of the Patterson-Gimlin film, we know Rawicz's astute observations in matching likenesses to the North American Sasquatch in the 1940's, prior to the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin filming, were astonishing field notes for that period of time and under conditions of survival, starvation and fear.  I cannot intellectualize how Rawicz could make such creature descriptions of the day, never having had prior knowledge and have it be so similar in detail to what we know about hirsute hominoids today.
 
Slavomir Rawicz also noted that these creatures were bipedal saying "At no time did they drop to the ground on all fours” or display the "knuckle-walking" habit of chimpanzees and gorillas.  Knuckle walking is a term devised by American Anthropologist Russell Tuttle to describe the gait of African apes on the ground. Rawicz seemed confident in his assessments that what they saw was a hirsute biped.
 
Surely Slavomir Rawicz's early field notes lack the peer recognition they so richly deserve. Rawicz's interpretations of his observations before the era of sensationalized Bigfoot journalism are intelligently thought out for a man under stress, fleeing captivity, in fact running for his life as an escaped prisoner of war. His field notes should be placed among the exemplary reports in hominoid research.
 
In a recent issue of the Fortean Times, The Bigfoot Times Newsletter Editor Daniel Perez demonstrated a different viewpoint with regard to the Rawicz story. 

In Perez’s book review of Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe's ”Field Guide To Bigfoot, Yeti and other Mystery Primates Worldwide,” 1999; Daniel Perez makes this critical comment stating:

"Long after this alleged episode, famous mountaineer Eric Shipton, expedition leader of the successful assault on Mt. Everest, studied the text of 'The Long Walk' and later expressed considerable doubt about the terrain Rawicz claims to have traversed. Therefore, on the heels of questionable and shaky geography described by Rawicz, the damned testimony of the alleged witness [Rawicz] has to come into question."

Rawicz’s testimony was never “damned,” I would suggest Perez is dramatizing here. I questioned Rawicz about this in 2000 and he said Shipton wouldn’t speak to him, despite numerous attempts at contact, Shipton even rebuffed an offered handshake at one point …but Rawicz doubted that Shipton ever traversed any terrain on the Chinese side of Sikkim.

Considering the penchant Coleman has for sensationalize embellishments in his works, I am inclined to discount the Perez/Coleman opinions.

I also questioned Coleman and Perez about that paragraph, -neither man interviewed Shipton or Rawicz but Coleman wrote in an email, “Shipton was known to be a difficult man.” Daniel Perez did not illustrate Shipton's claims by rote, citation or page numbered sources.

I could find no direct conflict with the terrain described as the route taken by the six individuals with Rawicz or any written difference of opinion by Shipton, who by the way, ascended Mt. Everest which is located in Nepal’s mountain range, not Sikkim or Bhutan; a far cry from Siberia, Mongolia and the Gobi desert route into Bhutan and Sikkim that Rawicz traversed.  Even if Shipton disagreed with the landmarks described by Rawicz, does that disaffirm the authenticity of the tall and hairy creatures described in Rawicz's book? 

It is interesting to note that archaeologist-author Dr. Myra Shackley also concluded Rawicz's story was questionable and based her opinion solely on Shipton's feelings without further research.

There is no evidence that Eric Shipton ever traveled Rawicz’s route afoot, under the same conditions or in the same season.

In addition, Shackley wrote that what Rawicz and the other escapees saw were but specks in the distance, yet in "The Long Walk" Rawicz clearing states the men were perched 12 feet above them and only 100 yards away.  The recounting of these stories in follow-up textbooks has a way of distorting the original manuscript.

Rawicz told me that Zoologist Dr. Wladimir Tschernezky, who assisted Rawicz in sketching the creatures also interviewed 3 of the escapees in the same period of time the sketch was done for the book - he was satisfied in their description of the hairy subjects. The sketch is HERE ...
 
I find Perez, Shipton and Shackley’s judgments lacking in research, poorly concluded and critically premature.  Perhaps we human's err in judging the quality of witness sources based exclusively on a single person's account because the name seemingly carries some kind of weight. Because opinion is written in a book, doesn't make it fact regardless of who or what the author may be or how high his pedestal stands.  Assessments like Shipton’s are usually motivated from a personal opinion other than fact.

Reading “The Long Walk” the second time around was as hypnotic a read as it was 10 years ago.  For the unsure, this true drama is a real bargain as a used book. If you’re interested in hirsute hominids, you’ll be amazed at Rawicz’s field notes.

Book Review © From the files of Bobbie Short, 2000

Update: April 2004 …Slav and Marjorie have passed on…
http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/slav_rawicz.htm

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