The film The Way Back, starring Colin Farrell and Ed Harris, is based on this amazing true story.

Twenty-six-year-old cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 during the German-Soviet partition of Poland and sent to the Siberian Gulag. In the spring of 1941, he escaped with six of his fellow prisoners, including one American. Thus began their astonishing trek to freedom.

With no map or compass but only an

...

"Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: she is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to a Siberian...

"A stunning supernatural thriller set in Siberia, where a film crew is covering an elusive ghost story about a highway built on top of the bones of prisoners of Stalin's gulag. Kolyma Highway, otherwise known as the Road of Bones, is a 1200 mile stretch of Siberian road where winter temperatures can drop as low as sixty degrees below zero. Under Stalin, at least eighty Soviet gulags were built along the route to supply the USSR with a readily available...

When a diamond merchant from America travels to Siberia to find a buyer for a collection of blue diamonds with rare and mysterious origins, he becomes tangled in an affair with the owner of a small Siberian cafe. The more obsessive his affair becomes, the more the dangerous world of the Russian diamond trade intrudes upon his life, until eventually it seems there is no way out for either him or his lover. Both his relationship and the diamonds are...

During World War II, when she was eleven years old, the author and her family were arrested in Poland by the Russians as political enemies and exiled to Siberia. She recounts here the trials of the following five years spent on the harsh Asian steppe.