Gary W. Toyn

A Haunting WWII Novel Inspired by Actual Events

Spanning Nazi-occupied Lithuania, Soviet labor camps, and the refugee corridors of wartime Europe, From Malice to Ashes follows three families torn apart by two brutal regimes.

Olek Kosmen, a young Jewish man hiding in a forest cabin, becomes an unwitting chronicler to one of the Holocaust’s earliest massacres in Lithuania’s Ponary Forest. Eventually captured, Olek is forced into the Nazi “Burning Brigade,” a unit of 80 men tasked with exhuming and incinerating the bodies of Ponary’s victims to erase the evidence. Knowing they’ll be executed once they finish their grisly job, the prisoners’ only hope for survival lies in an audacious escape tunnel they are digging with their bare hands. As SS soldiers push them to complete the gruesome task and Soviet forces close in, the race to finish the tunnel tests the prisoners’ will to survive beyond human limits.

Meanwhile, Olek’s fiancée flees to neutral Sweden, while her parents are deported to Siberia, where they must survive one of Stalin’s harshest labor colonies. Their fates converge in a sweeping, true-to-history story of resistance, survival, and the will to reclaim family and truth.

From Malice to Ashes offers a powerful and meticulously researched portrait of moral courage amid unimaginable horror. For readers of Mark Sullivan and Kristin Hannah, this compelling and ultimately redemptive novel sheds light on a largely forgotten chapter of Holocaust history.

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