A walk too short

Generally Survivor stories have a charm that usually attracts me to them. That is how I landed in this book. This definitely has a charm and keeps you turning the pages. The story is definitely incredible.

I am fine with the book and the interest it had gathered in the past considering this definitely as an interesting narration for a fiction, for a specific audience. However, when it is projected as a real life experience, I have certain apprehensions.
First of all, what one notices is, this is told with a motive devoid of any personalization of People, Location and their Nativity. Even the Landscapes are glazed over without any particular detail. Intially, it was not that much noticeable when it went over the Siberian Snows, possibly because my connect with the landscape and its people is limited to those books I have read, which is woefully thin. Slowly when it moves across the Mangolian Plain and the Gobi desert, I feel a sense of unease slowly seeping in, as the narration brings people and incidents which run contrary to what I have read over the time. This becomes sharper, and runs like a torrent, when the story pans out to Himalayas, since I have much clearer idea about the landscapes involved due to my treks, Visits and readings over the time. I guess way back in 1956 there was very little material available in the popular domain for one to call out the situation. But today people have read enough and been presented visually about the People, history, Lives and Landscapes of various places so much, one can not just narrate anything that is not in line with the reality.

The narration looks almost like a dead body found on a murder site that is meticulously cleaned of any trace to its identity, cause etc.!!

So I felt little bit disappointed and then went back and read about various controversies around it and it is a story that is more intriguing than the book it self! There were 2 people who claimed the story as theirs, one being the author and the other being another Polish POW.
Finally, the latest findings have indicated both their stories could be false!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-11900920
https://www.sentinelsource.com/commun...

Nevertheless it is an interesting one for a the incredible human feat that it speaks about, if it ever truly took place.

This book, if nothing else, could be an academic exercise of how to smell a false narrative, however interesting it sounded!