There is"The Long Walk" by Slavomir Rawicz which I read some years ago.In it the surviving POWS wind up in British India after a year on the run from Soviet Russia.If you click on that title at Amazon some like books show up including the one by Bauer.One I read when it came out that I thought excellent was "Man is Wolf to Man" by Janusz Bardach in which he a Polish Jew in the Red Army is sent to a Siberian Camp after accidently putting a tank in a river.A chilling account of Siberia.
"...the surviving POWS wind up in British India...
The one that I really like and always have is Heinrich Harrar, the revelations of which were posted by my fellow poster(an East German) in Western European forum at nytimes. Whose story was indelibly filmed to star Brad Pitt; as a result Brad now makes German movies, he looks like their "Ideal". I think, that one was called, Seven Years in Tibet (and if people get that mixed up with his other Seven or sevsan, whatever it is called, too bad).
I was always really curious about this story but the film does not tell the whole thing which is why the East German posted.
Brad(or Heinrich) was living a fairly normal life being a fair-haired boy when the Nazis co-opted him, similar to the Gunther Grass story but at least Grass got to go to Art school.
Up to that point, Heinrich Harrar had been a mountain climber par excellence, had a world record. Then about reaching the heights, at such a young age so to speak, the SS came calling on him to train the ski patrols as they began invading cold Northern European climate. He was flabberghasted but he had never thought about leaving the country, leaving his homeland until this question of "serving one's country" in some capacity.
I don't recall all the details anymore but I knew of him because he became the Dalai Lama's science teacher in the more mechanical and engineering side of applied sciences. The Tibetans did neat things themselves; like the Iranians, they go wind flying on the updraft of mountains(like this Eagle wired for motion photography at high speed which I saw last night on tv). The movie that Brad Pitt did of Seven Years.... is a fairly accurate history of the Tibetan invasion by the Chinese and how it was arranged, as long as you have some background on the Tibetan nuances and what the culture is about and what it is like.
In any case how this all came to be was when the British picked him up as an enemy combatant(exactly as Gunther Grass had been warned about, as the Russian advanced, and was told by the old soldier to rip off his collar tags or the Soviets would hang him). The British slammed Heinrich into a prison camp in India for the time being. This depiction of the prison camp under desert conditions is a pretty good example for the living conditions at Guantanamo that you have not been seeing.
In, Seven Years in Tibet, Pitt/Harrar talks David Thewlis into going with him and making the escape, because Harrar knows that once beyond the uplands, when they pass through Nepal either toward Everest or on the Altaic plane to the West in the direction of Tien Shan, that he will not be able to survive alone without a partner.
By the time that they arrive and see the view of Lhasa, it is pretty much brings to mind that old Hollywood classic: Shangrila, the very intriguing court life in the monastery of the Potala is as interesting as anything in the dark old Kremlin of the Tsars. It is in fact just the other side, for the Russians and the Japanese have been slipping through here for many years exploring for military reasons. As the child Dalai Lama asks him questions,Pitt begins to instruct his Holiness in Western Science and becomes the official tutor in Western subjects. Pitt and Thewlis are now plunked down in Tibetan style matrimony; I seem to remember a young seamstress in this episode of the history because they obviously need new clothes.
Everything is just fine until the usual factions choose side and the Chinese are invading from the East (depending on which maps you have because on some maps they are already on the West). The object is to avoid them by heading south by yak train (and although one of the factions would be CIA trained in Colorado), to make their way down into the highlands again at Dorjeling/Darjeeling.
After which, Heinrich Harrar, still blond, ruddy, from life in the environment for which he trained, returns home to an estranged wife in a post-war world. I believe there might have been a child who merely reminded him of the Dalai Lama who had been his student. It is so German; or should I say Austrian? He is the next most enlightened Westerner other than Lama Anagarika Govinda, also Austrian. I think they are all dead now; save for the Dalai Lama himself who is in my age group.
"a passable Germanic accent as Austrian journeyer Heinrich Harrar in Seven Years in Tibet, a performance many have credited as the best of his career. ..." Pitt's Planet.
(I'd say so, with exception of, Fight Club).
Ps, I have also reversed the national origins by mistake. Harrer is the Carinthian Austrian; and Govinda was born in Germany
