The straightness of his back came from something else: that on his third attempt at escape from prison camp he was beaten senseless, and his skull and neck broken, by two Breton peasants with pitchforks, and was invalided out in exchange for a U-boat commander.

ECONOMIST: M.R.D. Foot

The new Peter Weir film, loosely adapted from an unreliable memoir by Slavomir Rawicz, is about a bunch of prisoners who escape from a Siberian labor camp in 1940 and set out on the long trek back to civilization.

NEWYORKER: The Way Back