I have a compass.
It was found by my father as a sixteen year old boy, at the side of a dead German soldier he came across, laying in the  woods in 1941.
These woods were on the land of a farm owned by my grandfather in Yugoslavia.
My father's job as a young boy was to protect the sheep from wolves that came out of the forests during the night.
He could not have known at the time but this compass was to save his life.

Later the German soldiers called at every household in the village, having come to take the oldest son to work in the forced labour camps.
One morning they knocked on the door of his farmhouse, yet the oldest son (his brother Stojan) had injured his arm in a farming accident.
My father volunteered to go in his place and was pulled from the clutches of his mother who thought she would never see her son again.
He was taken to a town called Bor close to the Bulgarian border.

For me there is a beauty in listening to the words of someone when English is not their native tongue, the words they choose when they are describing things.
My father would very rarely talk about what happened to him during these times, in common with a lot who went through the horrors of WWII.
Yet in the very rare occasions when he did.... he told me that at that camp, he felt like a frog in a pan of water, where every day the water was getting gradually hotter.
He had to try to escape one way or another and get free from that awful place.
He and his older cousin did escape together, but his cousin was leading him the wrong way and straight into heavily fortified german positions.
With the help of that compass and some brave people who risked their lives to assist them on their way, travelling under cover of darkness, after many days, half starved, these two young cousins made it home.
The look of joy on his mother's face when she saw him walking on the path to their little house, was to stay in his heart for the rest of his days.

Later he would again have to leave his home, his mother, his family and his country....but this time he would never see her again. As the Communists took over Yugoslavia, he  and over a million others would become displaced people and passed from transit camp to transit camp.
I suppose he would be classed as "fortunate" for he survived and he and his compass made it to England...otherwise I would not be here to tell you this story today.
Yet the plight of the ones who escaped then were sent back to the Communists, was to be the reason I wrote my book.
I couldn't forget what happened to them.

Before he passed away in 2007 my father gave me that compass, which still works to this day.
The pointer is luminous, and this helped him navigate under the light of the moon.
One day when it's my turn to shuffle from this mortal coil, I will pass this compass to one of my sons, and hope he cherishes it as I have done, with my memories of all those men who survived and made a new life so far from the family and home they loved.