The missing persons bureau of the Red Cross organization in Ukraine marked its tenth anniversary the week before last. From the first day of its establishment it has been working in close cooperation with corresponding organizations in forty other countries. It traces members of families separated during World War II, in armed conflicts of recent years, during natural disasters, and other calamities. It also searches for records confirming the facts of Ukrainian citizens’ internment in Nazi concentration camps, ghettos, forced labor, and POW camps. It traces burial sites and examines the condition of graves of the defenders of our fatherland killed in action outside Ukraine, as well as burial sites of foreign combatants killed in Ukraine. Incidentally, the service has traced nearly 6000 burial sites of Ukrainian fighters that perished during World War II in Western Europe. Since it was launched a decade ago it has processed 280,000 inquiries. Of these, 98,000 cases have been brought to a close, with 42,000 having a positive result. Nearly 70% of all inquiries relate to the period of World War II. For various reasons 200,000 Ukrainians deported to Germany did not return home and their relatives still nurture hopes of finding out what befell their kin. Hostilities rage in different parts of the world and divide families, rendering their reunions highly problematical. During the Soviet Union’s Afghan War 419 citizens of the former USSR were missing or were held as prisoners of war. Currently the number of those missing is 290. The Ukrainian search service has traced ten graves of our compatriots who perished in Afghanistan and also tracked down three Ukrainian nationals who managed to survive. One of them is about to return home to Donetsk oblast. The search service is staffed by ten women from various walks of life (engineers, philologists, and interpreters) who have a perfect command of foreign languages as well as being skilled in the precise and scrupulous handling of documents. They are compassionate and display keen intuitive perception. The archives of all possible agencies in Ukraine provide them with all needed information. They are quite familiar with the massive information resources of the existing archives. The service processes nearly 200 inquiries a week. On occasion as many as twenty additional inquiries need to be filed with different agencies. The work of the service is made all the more difficult by the fact that most archival files on Ukrainian nationals who were victims of totalitarian and Nazi rule have not been preserved or eventually ended up abroad. For this reason the service staff has gone to great lengths to compile its own archives. Currently, the card file of the service includes over 200,000 entries. The Red Cross Committee and the National Association of Germany have provided the money for a local computer network of ten workstations with a database server operating a special search engine that has augmented the efficiency of the work of the Ukrainian bureau.
