"The Way Back" is the fact-based story of the escape of soldiers from a Siberian gulag in 1940. It is based on several sources, most notably the Slavomir Rawicz book "The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom." The book is Rawicz's account of being captured by the Red Army in 1939 and his journey to freedom with other inmates. The group crossed the Siberian arctic, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas, finally settling in Tibet and India.