Finding soldier Tom: Solving family mystery of WW2 Soviet prisoner of war

"We were digging stone from the quarry, from six in the morning to six at night, our food consisting of soup at midday and a very meagre portion of bread and some butter at tea-time. We had no breakfast," Tom later wrote in his diary."For the slightest thing, we were brutally beaten… and if we could not work, we were starved and beaten again; they would never believe we were sick."For more than two years he was hidden by the Le Bretons.The danger was real. Another Jersey resident, Louisa Gould, was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and murdered in a gas chamber for sheltering a Soviet escapee named Fyodor Burriy. Her neighbours had reported her to German authorities.Atlantic-Press/Ullstein bild via Getty ImagesA German occupation soldier stands on the Jersey coast in the summer of 1940John and Phyllis Le Breton trusted their escaped soldier so much that they allowed him to read to their children and play with them, including their daughter Dulcie."Our dear Uncle Tom, we loved him so much. He is my main memory of the war, and his photo is still by my bedside," said Dulcie, who turns 90 in June."But I am still mystified what happened to him after the war."Even though we have worked for years on Soviet and wartime archives, this case presented a particular challenge.Tom had signed his name in English, and it was not clear how it would have been rendered in Russian, the language used in official documents across the USSR at the time.We checked dozens of records and hundreds of spelling variations, gradually narrowing the search using details he had recorded in his diary.From those entries, it appeared he was about 30 when he was mobilised in 1941, had fought and been captured on the territory of present-day Ukraine, and may have had Central Asian origins.The search was then narrowed to one likely match: Bokejon Akramov, born in 1910 and mobilised from Namangan, in what is now Uzbekistan.AlamyWe found an entry showing that he had been awarded the Order of the Patriotic War decades later. Crucially, that record included a home address.At this point a team from BBC Uzbek joined the search and travelled to Namangan to check the address, hoping someone there might remember Bokejon or recognise him from the photographs preserved by the Le Breton family.