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

Finding soldier Tom: Solving family mystery of WW2 Soviet prisoner of war36 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleBBCThe Le Breton family held on to this picture of Soviet prisoner of war "Tom" in the hope of finding out what had happened to himOlga IvshinaBBC News RussianFor more than 80 years, no-one knew what happened to a Soviet prisoner of war who escaped from the Nazis on the Channel Islands and spent the rest of World War Two hiding from the German occupiers with a local family.Known only by his first name, Bokejon, or simply Tom, he was one of about 2,000 Soviet prisoners and forced labourers brought to the island of Jersey to build Nazi fortifications.After liberation, Tom and the other surviving PoWs were sent back to the USSR and although he promised to keep in touch, once he had returned nothing was heard from him again.That was until BBC teams tracked down his descendants in Central Asia, far away from Jersey in the far east of Uzbekistan.It was in 1943 that Tom escaped one of the Nazis' forced labour camps on Jersey. Exhausted, starving and desperate, he knocked on the door of local farmers John and Phyllis Le Breton. They knew the risk, but they took him in and saved his life.Conditions in the camps were harsh."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 bil...