If nobody in your family emigrated
Nobody emigrated. Somebody was taken.
Most of what we have written on this site is about people who left — who queued at Hamburg with a ticket and a village name a clerk spelled by ear. More than two million people from Ukraine did not leave. They were taken, between 1941 and 1944, to work in German factories and on German farms, and a great many families in the diaspora today descend from the ones who never went back. If that is your family, almost nothing you have read here so far was written about you. This page is.
Why the story stops at your grandparents
The silence is usually not forgetfulness. A person who had been in Germany came home to be screened, and the label followed them for decades: work in the Reich was something the Soviet state held against you when you applied to study, to move, to be trusted with anything. Families learned to say the years 1942 to 1945 had been spent somewhere vague. Children were told nothing so that they would have nothing to repeat at school.
The ones who avoided repatriation had a different silence. They spent the late forties in displaced persons camps in the western occupation zones, sailed under the refugee resettlement schemes between 1947 and 1951, and arrived in Winnipeg or Chicago or Curitiba with papers that recorded a nationality, sometimes a wrong one deliberately given, and rarely a village. A name written down twice by two clerks who had never seen it written is a name that arrives in two forms.
This is why the family memory so often ends exactly where the research has to start — and why the documents matter more here than in almost any other kind of search: the paper remembers what the family agreed not to.
Three trails, and they run through different countries
A person taken west leaves records in the state that took them, the state that took them back, and the district they came from. They are three separate searches, and knowing which one answers your question saves both money and months.
- The German registration — the Arolsen Archives at Bad Arolsen hold the labour and camp records the Reich itself created, along with the displaced persons paperwork that came after. Registration cards, employer names, dates of arrival. Their collection is online, searchable by anyone, and free
- The return — the repatriation apparatus of Soviet Ukraine registered those brought back after 1945, and its records are in the Central State Archive of Supreme Bodies of Power in Kyiv. This is the trail if the person came home
- The screening — a returning labourer was filtered by the security organs, and the file they opened is now in the state archive of the oblast the person came from. For the Kyiv region that is the State Archive of Kyiv Oblast, whose finding aids are online
- The village itself — birth, marriage and death registration after 1919 sits in the same oblast archive, not in a church. This is what turns a name and a date into parents, grandparents and a house number
What is in a filtration file, and why it is worth more than it sounds
The file exists because the state suspected the person. That is an ugly origin for a document and it produced, by accident, the single richest genealogical source of the Soviet period: a questionnaire filled in about somebody who had to account for every year of their life. Where and when they were born. Their parents' names. The village they were taken from and the date. Where they worked and for whom. Who else from the same village was there. When they crossed back.
There is often a photograph. There is sometimes a statement in the person's own words, taken down by an officer who was not trying to preserve anything, which is why it survives at all.
It is also the one document that names the village unambiguously. A ship manifest gives you a clerk's guess; a filtration questionnaire gives you an administrative record written where the administration knew exactly which village it meant.
Why the spelling never matches
A German factory clerk in 1942 heard a Ukrainian name and wrote it in German. A Soviet officer in 1946 heard the same name and wrote it in Russian. An American immigration officer in 1950 heard it a third time. None of them was careless — they were writing down a sound, in three orthographies that do not agree on what the sound is.
The villages moved too. Districts were redrawn in 1923, 1930, 1939 and 1959; villages were merged, renamed, and in the Chornobyl zone abandoned entirely. A name that was correct on the day it was written can now belong to no administrative unit at all.
So a search that fails on the exact spelling has not proved anything. It has only proved that the exact spelling was not the one used by whoever indexed that particular collection.
What you can do today without paying anybody
Two of these you can do yourself in an evening, and we would rather tell you that than have you pay us for it.
- Search the Arolsen collection online yourself. It is free, it is in English, and it holds tens of millions of documents. Try the surname alone, then the surname with a birth year, then the German spellings — an -enko often became -enko, but a Ж became a Sch and a И an I or a Y
- Put the village name as your family says it into our free finder, which knows what an English, German or Polish ear did to a Ukrainian place name and which district it lands in today
- If you already hold a document — a registration card, a DP camp paper, a certificate in Cyrillic — our free reader will transcribe and translate it, and it reads typed German and Soviet clerical hands as well as parish registers
- Write to the archive yourself. Our free letter generator produces a letter in Ukrainian, correctly addressed, with the sentence about paying the published tariff that turns a request into something staff can act on
What we do, and when it is worth paying for
The assessment is free and it is not a sales call. Tell us the name, the approximate year of birth, and whatever your family says about where they were taken from, and we will tell you plainly which of the three trails your case is on, what is likely to survive, and what it would cost to have it worked. If the answer is that the records burned, we say that, and it costs you nothing to have heard it.
What you are paying for, when you do pay, is the part that cannot be done from a laptop in Toronto: a researcher who goes to the reading room, orders the file, reads a hand nobody has taught for seventy years, and photographs what is there. And, if you want it, the journey to the village afterwards — which is the only part of this work that is not about paper.
What families ask us about this
My grandmother never said she was in Germany. Could I be wrong about this?
You might be, and the documents will say so. But the pattern is common enough to be worth testing: a gap of three or four years in the war, an arrival in the West between 1947 and 1951, a reluctance to discuss it, and no emigration story from before the war. If those fit, the Arolsen search alone will usually settle it — and it costs nothing to look.
Does anything survive if the person never came back to the USSR?
Yes, and often more. Someone who stayed in the West leaves the German wartime registration and then the displaced persons record — camp, resettlement scheme, ship, destination — most of which is in the same Arolsen collection. What is missing in that case is the Soviet side, so the village end of the search has to be done in the oblast archive from the other direction, starting from a birth date rather than from a returning person's file.
We only know the region, not the village. Is that enough?
Sometimes. A filtration file is indexed by the person, not by the village, so a name and a rough year of birth can be enough to find one — and the file then tells you the village. That is the useful thing about this trail: it can run in the opposite direction to the usual one.
Is the village archive going to answer during the war?
Some do and some do not, and it varies by month. Several archives have been operating from evacuation since 2022; some answer in weeks, some do not answer at all. We say which is which when we look at your case, and we do not promise a timeline the institution has not given us.
Do you do this for people whose families were deported to Siberia rather than to Germany?
Yes. It is a different set of records — the special settlement files rather than the filtration ones — but it is the same kind of search, and the same principle applies: tell us the name and the year and we will say for free whether there is a trail worth following.
Tell us the name and the year
That is genuinely all we need to give you an honest first answer: a name as your family says it, an approximate year of birth, and the region if you know it. The assessment is free, and it comes back as a paragraph about your case, not a brochure.
The family stopped talking about it. The file did not.
If your grandparents' war years are a gap in the story, there is a good chance three archives have written down what happened in them. Tell us the name and we will tell you, for nothing, which of the three to open first.