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Anyone else caught The Way Back? It’s an epic film showing at the moment in several Merlin cinemas telling the thought-to-be-true story of a group of prisoners in a Russian Gulag who escape and walk 4,000 miles from Siberia to India – and freedom – in the most ridiculously inhospitable conditions and with the odds stacked horrifically against them.

Well, aside from being an inspiring film with staggering scenery, for Cornish viewers there is an added twist. As I sat there in chilly conditions in St Ives’ cinema, just a few miles away in Camborne lives the man who claims to be the real-life protagonist of this drama. Having kept it to himself for decades, in 2009 Witek Glinski told his tale to a journalist.

I thought a quick google would establish the bare bones of the true story but no… pretty much all facts to do with this seem still to be under discussion and whole books have been written on the subject. Here’s one of many articles about it. And another. I got sucked in and before long I had been clicking around for the best part of an hour.

Still, true or not true, and whether the real-life mega-hero of the story does indeed live in Cornwall or Read the rest of this entry »