As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me, Bauer - C+

                                               This story was written in the mid-fifties in W. Germany and is about Lt. Clemens Forell, a Wehrmacht officer with the most unique post-war experience I have ever read about.  The Soviets imprisoned, in the Gulag, those POWs who survived the war.  Those who lived were not freed until after Stalin died in 1953. Forell chose a different option; he walked thousands of miles over three years on the road from Siberia to Bavaria.
                                               He left a camp near the Bering Straits in eastern Siberia in October of 1949. He was aided by a physician who had stashed gear for his own effort, but realized he was terminally ill.  Although reasonably well-equipped, it was not possible to do without help from people along the way. The first two groups to help were reindeer herders who lived a nomadic life and were not inclined to cooperate with the authorities. They were followed by three Russian Gulag escapees, and then a tribe of Yakut dog breeders.  As he was preparing to cross the border into Mongolia, a German who had been stuck in Siberia since WW1 suggested that he head west and gave him some names of people to seek in the Urals. He was eventually helped by an Armenian Jew, and was ultimately taken into Iran by smugglers in 1952.  It took months for him to convince them he was not a Communist spy.  The book was re-published because a movie was made of this story in 2001.