15 April 2026Admin1 min read
This memoir recounts Natalia Sergeevna Volkova's decades-long search for information about her father, Sergeant Sergei Mikhailovich Volkov, who was captured by German forces in 1942 and spent three years in various POW camps across Europe before being liberated by British forces in northern Germany in April 1945.
Sergei Volkov was among thousands of Soviet POWs who were repatriated through British processing centres. His journey took him through a temporary camp in the north of England, where he spent approximately six weeks before being transported to a port for repatriation to the Soviet Union.
Natalia's search began in the 1990s, after the opening of Soviet archives. She discovered her father's name in a repatriation list held at ГАРФ (State Archive of the Russian Federation), which indicated he had passed through British custody. However, the British records she found at the National Archives in Kew contained only partial information.
In 2017, Natalia contacted the Immortal Regiment UK project and shared her father's story. Through the network of volunteers, she was able to obtain additional photographs of the camp where her father was held and connect with a British historian specialising in POW repatriation.
"My father never spoke about the war," Natalia writes. "He carried the weight of those years silently. It was only after his death in 1987 that I began to understand what he had endured. Finding his name in a British archive — seeing it written in English, in a foreign hand — made his suffering feel real in a way that Soviet documents never did."
This memoir was originally written in Russian and translated for the moypolk.uk archive with the author's permission.
