A new film called “The Way Back” was released in London on Boxing Day. Listers might find it interesting in view of the background to this film which is described as “inspired by a true story” – a journey of over 4000 miles from Arctic Siberia, through Russia, Mongolia, across the Gobi desert and China, through the Tibetan mountains and across the Himalayas to India in 1942. According to a later book, this trek was achieved wearing home-made moccasins instead of boots, and without a map or compass, and avoiding all outside contact/help for fear of capture.    The only positive evidence that this unlikely trek ever occurred is when, in Calcutta in 1942 a British Army Intelligence Officer, Rupert Mayne, interviewed three emaciated and bedraggled Polish-speaking men who had been picked up by a Gurkha patrol in Sikkim. They said they had escaped from a Gulag in Siberia and walked to India. Then the story was given wings by a book published in 1956 purporting to be by a Pole who had taken part in the journey. But research by the BBC and others over the last ten years discovered that this Pole was elsewhere in 1941-42, and there was no evidence to show that his companions as named ever existed, and furthermore that the book had been ghost-written by a Daily Mail reporter, Ron Downing, who had been hunting for Yeti sightings in the Himalayas which this unlikely story conveniently included! Unsurprisingly, Downing’s book had numerous flaws which showed large parts of the tale to be fiction, but it appealed to the public as an inspiring example of man surviving against all odds, and was translated into 25 languages. However the hearsay evidence of Mayne’s 1942 interview remains the only evidence that such a trek ever occurred – that is apart from a second Pole who popped up a couple of years ago to say it was his story – but then he had had a copy of the original ‘fictional’ book to work from!   David