It's highly rewarding seeing recent films from the German perspective of events, during WW2. This one concerns the hundreds of thousand of captive German soldiers (at the end and after the war), that were shipped to the Russian Gulags and never seen again. This is the true story of just one individual, who managed to escape and then walk across the whole of the country, to the Iranian border (which took him around three years). He was not only chased by an obsessive camp commander but had to endure, walking through Siberia in temperatures dropping to -40 degrees. You could never have made it up (surely he would have perished) and if this real event had been either an American or a British soldier, he would have indeed been World famous and depicted on stamps. It remains one of the finest testaments of human endeavour and the film does him a rightly so heroic justice. Also to the Jewish man who helped him, with just a sheer kindness.