Ashes to the Vistula [Paperback]

Mr Bill Copeland (Author)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bill Copeland has published several short stories and poetry, and has won several awards from the National Writers Association for this and other novels. He has been writing for ten years and this is his first published novel. He is an historian and avid student of the Holocaust and this novel reflects hours of research filling the manuscript with details and historical background to accurately portray life in the concentration camp.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Libros International; 1st edition (March 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1905988168
• ISBN-13: 978-1905988167
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,313,974 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A time that must never be forgotten, August 19, 2007

By 

Gregory M. Sango (Leominster, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ashes to the Vistula (Paperback)

Human kind seems never to learn from its past but continues to repeat it. The voices that the author has listened to in his heart and spirit from a time of the worlds greatest horror can now feel they have been heard anew.

This work brings to our 21st century minds eye the times before when the world believed all was well and a monster came to us. This work brings that monster to us through a friendship of caring for another less fortunate and the promise made to that person.

If one never steps through the gates of the "Camp" this work will take your mind there and leave mark as that which is still carried by a few on their arms. Every person living today that can read and is willing not to turn away from the voices that call from the "camps" must "hear" their message through the words of "Ashes to the Vistula". The past must never be forgotten. Through the lives of the two, the lives of six million can be heard.

Greg Sango

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superbly worked story, July 3, 2008

By 

Philip Spires "Author of Mission, an African ... (La Nucia, Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ashes to the Vistula (Paperback)

"The insanity of war has robbed me of everything I knew and loved." These are the words of Filip Stitchko, a Pole, a concentration camp kapo, an overseer, a policeman in Auschwitz. And, by the time the reader has reached the end of Filip's story in Ashes To The Vistula by Bill Copeland, those words emerge with poignancy, irony and inescapable truth intermingled.

Ashes To The Vistula, at first sight, is a wartime memoir of an innocent victim. But, in war, who is not innocent? And who is not a victim? Equally, who is innocent? As a result of mere circumstance Filip finds himself appointed to a position of responsibility within the concentration camp. He happened to be in a certain place when the Second World War broke out. Filip was in Poland, a country that was squeezed by a partially-shared conspiracy in 1939. Whilst fascists moved east, professed socialists moved west and the state that was created to keep the eagle from the bear imploded. An elder brother, an officer, probably travelled, defeated, to Katyn where history disputed precisely whose guns, whose motives perpetrated a slaughter of Polish officers. Those left behind at the time, such as Filip and the younger Jakub knew nothing of the elder brother's fate.

This is one of the strengths of Bill Copeland's book. It has an immediacy, a present that it is uncomplicated by received hindsight. On many issues, Bill Copeland leaves the jury out, enabling the reader to empathise with the dilemmas that confronted wartime and immediate post-war experience. This is the book's subtlety. Though it is primarily plot led, the plot is genuinely surprising, ultimately engaging and, in a few late chapters, both confronts and rounds off several themes that the reader has registered throughout the narrative.

Central to the book's purpose is the relationship of dependence, ultimately inter-dependence between Filip, the privileged concentration camp policeman, and Jakub, a Jewish-named gentile, a slow-witted permanent child whose safety has been entrusted to the older Filip. Through the prosecution of his duty, Filip is revealed to be not only a protector, not only a survivor, but also ultimately a compassionate companion and overseer, despite the fact that both circumstance and insanity conspire against both young men. Filip is no saint, make no mistake, but there is an underlying reason for his excesses.

Ashes To The Vistula in essence is an anti-war book. In it the reader is presented with thousands of people who suffer the consequences of conflict. None of them have been protagonists, none of them have sought gain or power, except, of course, over their peers once they have been pitted against them as their competitors and antagonists.

This is where we find the book's tragedy. That war kills, that war kills innocents, that war creates potential for corruption and duplicity, all these are givens. But war also creates insanity, an insanity that affects all involved, where the need to punish someone, anyone, for one's own arbitrary suffering might override rationality, evidence or even experience. And perhaps, given that insanity, the need to expunge the inexplicable is greater than the need to seek explanation, since, when threatened, we all react before we think.

Ashes To The Vistula by Bill Copeland is an unusual and moving study of one aspect of World War Two. It has an immediacy and a clarity that bring the history of its setting completely to life.

5.0 out of 5 stars Ashes to the Vistula, August 25, 2008

By 

Sandra J. Cropsey - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ashes to the Vistula (Paperback)

Ashes to the Vistula - by Bill Copeland

When first presented with reading this novel, I found myself filled with dread and avoided reading the novel for a several weeks, not because I did not think the story a good one or the writing to be anything but good. After all, the novel was a finalist for the "Georgia Author of the Year Awards." I was filled with dread because I feared the setting of the story, the Holocaust, as I find reading about the atrocities man/woman commits against their fellow man to be so very painful and sad. (After more than 20 years, I still cannot complete Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for the same reason.)

Mr. Copeland's book is excellent, a beautiful love story--one of friendship and loyalty, growth and admiration, although set against the reality of a world turned upside-down and inside-out. A page-turner, the story demands to be read in its entirety and quickly. Mr. Copeland could have bombarded his readers with one atrocity after another, but instead he carefully controls the story while at the same time giving his readers a glimpse into the misery and inhumanity of the Holocaust, enough to remind us that we should never forget history, lest we surely repeat it. To forge something beautiful against something so hideous requires great skill. Mr. Copeland has that skill.

Sandra Jones Cropsey
Author of Who's There? and Tinker's Christmas