His impulse to paint was inspired by a joke by the art critic, Jan Verwoert: “Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it's a good idea.” He has painted since 2009, when he was commissioned to be part of a special exhibition during the Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. The same could be said of the “Enemies of the People” women who were depicted in what I have blogged about the last several days in “Till My Tale is Told.” Many women in ALZHIR prison camp should have been with their grandchildren instead of felling trees and being used as slave labor.Heman Chong paints to survive. There is a courage which flourishes in the worst kind of adversity and it is quite unspectacular. Instead they spent their days straining and lifting at the great fallen trees, working alongside men who were often half their age. They should have been telling tales to their devoted grandchildren, these oldsters. “And all the time my mind juggling with pictures of the stockaded camp…and always the men about me, the young ones like me who were resilient and quick to recover, the forty-year-olds who surprisingly (to me, then) moved slowly but with great reserves of courage and strength and the over fifties who fought to stay young, to work, to live, the men who had lived leisured lives and now, marvelously, displayed the guts to face a cruel new life very bravely.

The following is the description of what the inmates looked like based on their ages, according to 25 year old author Rawicz: I recommend seeing the movie if you don’t want to bother with the book. The film makers leave out many things but they DO portray other things quite accurately about the 4,000 mile walk.

Prisoners were treated like cattle and then these “Unfortunates” were forced to walk in the deep snow with chains north to Camp 303 in the northern part of Siberia close to Yakutsk. That was almost two years worth before the agonizing one month train trip (3,000 miles) on the trans-Siberian.

The recent movie starring Ed Harris “The Way Back” is based on this book but leaves out all the torture and hardship Rawicz lived through as a 25 year old privileged army officer first in Kharkiv (Ukraine) and then in the terrible prison in Moscow. It’s about a Polish army officer who was “sized up” as a spy for the Germans by the Soviets. My husband read this book titled “The Long Walk” written by Slavomir Rawicz when he was in 6th grade, it was published in 1956.

Long walk by slavomir rawicz