prisoners and prisons, russian

German midshipman Erich Killinger was captured by Russia at the start of World War I. Killinger escaped the Russian POW train in Siberia, fled to China, and passed through a series of German consulates and safe houses to Shanghai. Given fake identity papers, Killinger traveled in style by ship and rail from Shanghai to Skien, Norway, via the United States. He arrived back in Germany on March 6, 1916--eleven months after being captured.

Descended from an ancient Lithuanian family, the author's forebears were princes in their native Lithuania. Born in what is now Belarus, his family was ousted in 1939 as the Germans and Russians carved up Poland, and the area round it, between them. His family, along with thousands of others, was deported to Soviet Siberia to work and die. Before all hope was gone, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and Stalin needed help wherever he could get it. An army of Polish ex-prisoners, and part of the deported male civilian Polish population, fought the Germans. The rest of the deported civilians had to fend for themselves and Michal's mother and her children set off on a second grueling journey that would eventually take them to England.

in 1941, the author and six fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk where hunger, cold, untended wounds. untreated illness, and daily executions were everyday fare. Their route took them thousands of miles on foot---out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India and freedom.

The author describes his escape with a small group of fellow prisoners from a Soviet labor camp in 1941 and their subsequent trek out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, and Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India.