80 Years Later, They Finally Found Soviet Soldier Tom's Family and the Truth Will Destroy You

For over eight decades, one of Jersey’s most closely guarded wartime secrets remained unsolved: what happened to the Soviet prisoner of war known only as “Tom”?

It’s 1943. A starving, exhausted man named Bokejon knocks on the door of farmers John and Phyllis Le Breton on the Channel Islands. He’s an escapee from one of the Nazis’ brutal forced labour camps where 2,000 Soviet prisoners were enslaved to build German fortifications. The conditions were nightmarish - Tom later wrote in his diary about digging stone from six in the morning until six at night, surviving on meager soup and bread, enduring savage beatings for the slightest infraction.

The Le Bretons made an extraordinary decision. They hid him.

For more than two years, this family sheltered a fugitive despite knowing the consequences. Louisa Gould, another Jersey resident, had been deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp and murdered in a gas chamber for sheltering a different Soviet escapee named Fyodor Burriy. The danger was real and present. Yet the Le Bretons let Tom read to their children and play with their daughter Dulcie. He became Uncle Tom to a family that would never forget him.

When Jersey was liberated in May 1945, Tom was sent back to the Soviet Union like all surviving Soviet POWs. Three letters arrived as he traveled home across Europe. Then nothing. Silence for 80 years.

But the BBC Russian team wouldn’t let the mystery die. They combed through Soviet archives, checked hundreds of spelling variations, and pieced together that Tom was likely Bokejon Akramov from Namangan, Uzbekistan, born in 1910 and mobilized in 1941. That address led them directly to his grandson, Shamsutdin Akhunbaev, who answered the door and immediately asked: “How come you have my grandfather’s pictures?”

The reunion was devastating. Bokejon had rarely spoken about the war to his family, though they always wondered why such an intelligent man was repeatedly denied skilled jobs, instead working as a factory gardener. The wartime trauma had followed him home.

Bokejon died in 1996 after what his family described as a long and happy life. But now his descendants finally know the full story. The BBC organized a video call between Dulcie Le Breton, now 89, and her “Uncle Tom’s” family in Uzbekistan. “We are so happy that we found you,” they told her. “Our grandfather survived the war and gave us life only because of you.”

The Uzbek authorities have awarded John and Phyllis Le Breton the Order of Friendship posthumously. Dulcie will receive it on their behalf.