BBC Tracks Down Descendants of WWII Soviet POW Hidden by Jersey Family in Uzbekistan

BBC News reported that authorities in Uzbekistan have decided to posthumously award John and Phyllis Le Breton the Order of Friendship for their courage and compassion in hiding a Soviet prisoner of war during World War Two. The award, one of the highest state honors, will be presented to their daughter Dulcie Le Breton on Wednesday.

This follows a BBC-organized video call connecting Dulcie Le Breton on Jersey with Shamsutdin Akhunbaev, the grandson of the escaped prisoner known as Tom.

In the video call, Shamsutdin Akramov told Dulcie Le Breton, 'Dear Dulcie, we thank your family for your courage and kindness. Our grandfather survived the war and gave us life only because of you. We are so happy that we found you.

Dulcie Le Breton replied, 'My parents did what they did simply because it was the right thing to do. And they were far from the only people in Jersey who helped Soviet soldiers. Dulcie Le Breton, who turns 90 in June, said of Tom, 'Our dear Uncle Tom, we loved him so much.

BBC teams tracked down Tom's descendants in the far east of Uzbekistan, with a team from BBC Uzbek traveling to Namangan to check an address and meeting Shamsutdin Akhunbaev, identified as Bokejon Akramov's grandson. According to family accounts, Bokejon Akramov rarely spoke of his experiences in World War Two and was repeatedly refused skilled or sensitive jobs despite being intelligent and capable.

He worked as a gardener at a factory in Namangan for many years and died in 1996.

Bokejon Akramov was born in 1910 and mobilized from Namangan, in what is now Uzbekistan, in 1941 when he was about 30. He fought and was captured on the territory of present-day Ukraine, as recorded in his diary. Decades later, he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War.

Tom, known as Bokijon Akram or Bokejon Akramov, escaped from a Nazi labor camp on the island of Jersey in 1943. He knocked on the door of local farmers John and Phyllis Le Breton on Jersey that same year. The Le Bretons took in and hid Tom for more than two years during World War Two, allowing him to read to their children and play with them, including their daughter Dulcie.

Tom was one of about 2,000 Soviet prisoners and forced laborers brought to the island of Jersey to build Nazi fortifications. In the camps on Jersey, prisoners dug stone from the quarry from six in the morning to six at night, received soup at midday, a meager portion of bread, and some butter at tea-time, with no breakfast.

Prisoners were brutally beaten for the slightest thing and starved and beaten again if they could not work, according to Tom's accounts.

The risks were severe, as another Jersey resident, Louisa Gould, was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp for sheltering a Soviet escapee named Fyodor Burriy. Gould's neighbors reported her to German authorities on Jersey, and she was murdered in a gas chamber at Ravensbrück. The Channel Islands were liberated in May 1945.

After liberation, Tom and other surviving Soviet POWs were sent back to the USSR. Tom sent three letters to the Le Bretons as he was taken home across Europe after liberation, signing them as 'Bokijon Akram'. Ex-prisoners of war who returned to the Soviet Union were subjected to screening and interrogation in NKVD filtration camps.

Some ex-prisoners of war were sentenced and sent to labor camps inside the USSR. Joseph Stalin died in 1953.