ike millions of other Europeans, Walter Logé was caught in the violent vortex of World War II. An ambulance driver in the German army, he was taken prisoner toward the end of the conflict and shipped by boxcar deep into Russia to the gloomy labour camp of Makeyevka.

Logé was a pleasant and gentle man, with an almost childlike faith in the goodness of God and in the innate decency of men. But he owned nerves of steel, lightning-fast wits, and an incredible determination to escape. He must somehow cover the many hundreds of miles across the reaches of the Ukraine and Poland westward to Berlin, where his beloved wife and three children awaited him – if they were still alive.

This is not just another war story, or merely another chapter in the long bitter story of man’s inhumanity to man. It is not simply another dreary chronicle of misery and brutality, nor was it written to remind us that war brings suffering to the innocent and arouses the worst of human passions.

Rather it is a document of human freedom and brotherhood. It is more than a book, it is an experience. To follow Walter Logé on his desperate, but at times humorous, flight from degradation and slavery is a heart-warming adventure of the human spirit.