Germany

Karl is twelve years old, and he is good at maps. When his father goes away to the war, he leaves Karl two things: a compass that has been in the family for three lives of men, and a single rule — always check where north is before you decide which way to go.

So Karl begins to keep track. Night after night the radio reports another victory, another town taken far away in the east, and Karl marks each one with a pin on the big map above his desk. The pins march east. The compass agrees. For a while, everything points the same way.

But his father's letters are getting shorter. A house across the street has gone dark, and no one will say why. And slowly, quietly, Karl begins to notice all the small ways the map on his wall does not match the voice on the radio.

It's the summer of 1939, and Karl is eleven years old. His father is still home. The big map on his bedroom wall is still empty. And on a Saturday, high above the city on the suspended railway that swings over the river, his father takes out a small brass compass and shows him how to find north.

That summer, Karl is given a compass of his own — one that belonged to his grandfather — and a single rule to keep with it: always check where north is before you decide which way to go.

It is an ordinary summer: a birthday, a new map, the long light evenings. Karl does not yet know that it is the last one of its kind. This is the story of the summer before the first pin — and the father, and the compass, that everything after begins from.