‘Sabotage Sabotage You will be shot, ‘ yelled the duty guard officer while at the same time contorting his face, making him look like a monster I had seen in a horror movie, and also rabidly moving the stiffened palm of his hand across his throat in a cutting action that gave a meaning of certainty to his words. The guards and the uniformed office staff present nodded their heads indicating their full agreement with the officer’s decision.‘

Nick Standish spent the closing days of World War II as a child soldier pressed unwillingly into the service of the Luftwaffe. Survival and return to his father and brother were his only priorities, a task made seemingly impossible when he was accused of sabotage and threatened with death.

His thrilling memoirs cover a childhood spent in pre-war Yugoslavia, growing up as the clouds of war gathered over Europe. Then the Germans invade, and everything changes. The family moves gypsy-like from one town to another ending in Bela Crkva on the Rumanian border in 1942. There he enters a Russian Cadet School. His father enlists in a White Russian Army. His mother dies and he is left to face the unknown. After many harrowing episodes and near-death experiences, he survives the war. Then four years of being moved from one displaced persons camp in Austria to another, until migrating to Australia as an assisted migrant in 1949 and having his first square meal in 10 years