Book Review: Looking for Mr. Smith

By Janet O'Conor Camarata

Willis, Linda, Looking for Mr. Smith: Seeking the Truth Behind the Long Walk, the Greatest Survival Story Ever Told., New York, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010.

Readers familiar with the book, The Long Walk, first published in 1956, remember a survival story about a group of men caught up in the events preceding World War II. Each was sent to a labor camp in Siberia where they joined together in escaping during a blizzard and walking south-southeast for over a year. They walked from Siberia through Mongolia, into China, skirting Tibet and into India between April 1941 and the spring of 1942. The group experienced difficulties and hardships suffered defeats and deaths, and finally, as a much-shrunken band of survivors, they reached India and freedom.

The men who began their walk to freedom are all East European: young and old, skilled and unskilled workers from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Balkans. The oldest escapee at fifty-one was a mysterious Mr. Smith, an American. Along the way, they meet another escaped prisoner, a Polish teenager from Ukraine, who joined the group in their walk south. Of the nine who left Siberia and one they picked up along the way, only four made it to India alive.

For more than fifty years, questions about the long walk and the survivors remain unanswered. Did it actually happen? Who were they? What led to their imprisonment in Siberia? What happened to them after reaching freedom? What about their families? Who wrote the story? How did the book come to be written?

The author of Looking for Mr. Smith, Linda Willis first read the book, The Long Walk in the 1960s. In 1999, she became interested in genealogy and family history which prompted her to look for the story behind the initial book and to write her own story about her research adventures in getting the back story of the men who walked to India. Her research began with the memoir by former Polish prisoner of war Slawomir Rawicz, who claimed to have escaped from a Soviet Gulag and walked 4,000 miles to freedom in World War II.

Looking for Mr. Smith is not a "how-to" book, but instead tells "a tale of research." It solves mysteries, recounts the steps it took to move from goal to goal, using modern methods---the internet and email or older methods---using library card catalogs, using pen and paper to write letters of inquiry or phone calls to family members and representatives of historical and military organizations, national archives, museums and volunteer organizations across the world. Willis followed leads and dealt with dead ends, learned her lessons and passed on the wisdom gained from her experience in both the research and the writing phases of her book.  The book Willis wrote presents her research in a way that "should encourage others to take heart, follow through with any project they might have, and enjoy the experience no matter how daunting it first appears or how difficult the first step seems."

Both books,  The Long Walk and Looking for Mr. Smith, are available for check out through the Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System and for purchase through Amazon.  A major motion picture, The Way Back, based on The Long Walk, starring Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess and Ed Harris was released in 2010 as an American survival film directed by Peter Weir. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Make-up. The trailer for The Way Back is available to view on YouTube.

Janet O'Conor Camarata