Donbas : A True Story of an Escape Across Russia

by Jacques Sandulescu

Release Date: 30 November, 2000

Edition: Paperback

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Triumph

Amazing story. I'm glad it wasn't lost and is being republished. I bought two copies. This would be a great story for teenagers to read about endurance and survival (for all ages, but the story is easy to read and the guy is a teenager when he was captured by the Russians and sent to the slave camp). It is very remarkable story if even mostly true and now one of my favorite books.

Stranger than the truth

I had first heard about Jacques Sandulescu through my father, after he loaned me the book, "The Carpathian Caper", a novel by Sandulescu and Anne Gottleib. It was a Topkapi-esque adventure, about a man's return to his homeland behind the Iron Curtain after being kidnapped by Russian soldiers as a youth and shipped off to a Soviet slave labor camp, escaping after a mine cave-in crushed his legs, escaping to freedom, working his way West from black marketeer in the Middle East and Europe, to prize fighter in the midwest to nightclub owner in New York. It deals with his friend's plans to embarass the Russian Government by the very high profile heist of priceless religious icons right from under their noses.

The lead character, Jack, was one of those impossible men, like Indiana Jones, Dirk Pitt, Jack Ryan or James Bond. Who knew that he was for real?

Donbas is his story, the true tale of a 16 year old boy's decent into the hell of the mines in the Donbas region of the USSR. His torture, his survival, his escape and his life since then is the stuff great movies are made of. So why is Hollywood sitting on their hands on this one?

Read the adventure, then rent movies like "Moscow On The Hudson", "The Owl And The Pussycat" and "Trading Places". Watch for a big, burly man with a thick Russian accent and say hello to Jacques.