Se você quiser uma solução gráfica, talvez seja possível abri-los com Open Office ou Libre Office .
Há também anti-palavras
Antiword is a free MS Word reader for Linux and RISC OS. There are ports to FreeBSD, BeOS, OS/2, Mac OS X, Amiga, VMS, NetWare, Plan9, EPOC, Zaurus PDA, MorphOS, Tru64/OSF, Minix, Solaris and DOS. Antiword converts the binary files from Word 2, 6, 7, 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 to plain text and to PostScript.
catdoc -
Catdoc is a MS Word file decoding tool that doesn't attempt to analyze file formatting (it just extracts readable text), but is able to handle all versions of Word and convert character encodings.
E algumas outras opções mencionadas aqui (linux.com).