Finding soldier Tom: Solving family mystery of WW2 Soviet prisoner of war
Key takeaways
- 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.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
BBCThe Le Breton family held on to this picture of Soviet prisoner of war "Tom" in the hope of finding out what had happened to him Olga Ivshina BBC News Russian For 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.