He had been walking for two days, in somebody else's clothes, trying to find a way out of Kosovo, when he came across the photograph lying, face up, by the side of a dirt road.
The mind of Bashkim, a 38-year-old ethnic Albanian, was by then close to shutdown. Four days before, Serb paramilitaries in black balaclavas had arrived in his village, Krajlan, near the central town of Klina.
They had rounded everyone up, then separated the men from their women and children, and Bashkim had feared the worst.
With about 500 men he was ordered into a field outside the village and the paramilitaries told them all to strip. Their clothes were left in piles by the edge of the field. The men spent a sleepless night, naked and shivering in the rain, and later next day, the Serbs divided them into two groups.
Ninety men were separated from the rest, and kept in the field, without explanation.
Bashkim, like the others, was told to put on clothes, any clothes, from the sodden piles, and did so quickly, grabbing the first garments he could find.
Then he left, and heard machine gun fire behind him where the 90 men were being kept. By the following morning he was with 150 men, tired, hungry, and fearful of bumping into more paramilitaries.
It was then he came across the photograph. He looked, and looked again, and saw a child's face with fair hair and blue eyes staring back at him. It was his daughter.
Then, further up the trail, was another photograph. His uncle. And further still, a fragment torn from a larger photograph, was a picture of his wife.
And then he understood. His wife, in her desperation to guide her husband from danger as she headed for Albania amid a column of refugees, had torn up the family photo album, using the pictures, some torn into bits so that she had more of them, as markers to guide him to safety.
Bashkim led the other men along the paper trail that led up into the mountains. Soon others found similar photographs, left on the ground, or on rocks, or stuck to bushes.
They marked the route along a dirt road that became a mountain track leading finally to a hill-top border crossing into Albania and safety. It was the next morning when the men stumbled down into the first Albanian settlement, Kruma, and Bashkim found his wife and daughter waiting among dozens of families in the town's schoolhouse.
"It wasn't just my wife, some of the other women also used photographs in this way," says Bashkim, standing in the sunshine at the entrance to a tent in a refugee camp near the border. Behind him in the dark interior, her long blonde hair held in place by bright red and green clips, stands his little daughter, in a blue dress with red socks, too shy to venture past her father.
Bashkim, grey-haired and tired, has been asked not to talk to journalists by prosecutors of the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal, after he met them to offer evidence against his attackers.
This evidence may be dynamite, because he says that although his attackers wore balaclavas, he recognised them from their voices as being his Serb neighbours.
Now he and his family are to fly out of Kosovo to the UN tribunal's headquarters at The Hague, the beginning of a long judicial process he hopes will one day see these men brought to justice.
"I am sorry, I cannot say more, I was asked by the lawyers not to talk to journalists," he says, in good English, his round face breaking into a smile.
United Nations official, Ms Laura Baldrini, filled in the gaps.
She said his evidence against his attackers is some of the best yet collected from refugees on atrocities that have been taking place in Kosovo. She said it pointed to his attackers having been recruited by the Serbian warlord, Arkan, who was recently indicted for war crimes committed in Bosnia. As a result, the UN is taking no chances and Bashkim and his family are guarded by Italian troops.