In Search of the Displaced Persons

The following pages give an account of a twenty year search to uncover the mystery that had surrounded grandfather for the entirety of his life that he had spent living in the United Kingdom. All that was ever known of him were the basic facts that he was Serbian by nationality (although I was later to discover that he in fact lived in Bosnia) and that he was never to return to his native homeland again. The book is like that of a split personality, two sides that would never see the other until the final chapters were acknowledged, recorded and written together. It describes my own early recollections of the man and the time I would spend in his presence throughout childhood and teenage years until his death in 1988. The other persona tells of the other side that was left behind in Bosnia. The happiness, ever wandering, the horrors and finally, as the first one is uncovered, the understanding and joining together of both as finally one. The search would be a relentless task searching for a man that had no records of his existence prior to his displacement in 1946. Searching a country whose own bloodlust and carnage has seen whole generations of people and records of them disappear forever. A country whose varied people are so secretive in their own right and often hide their own pasts with a passion.