I'm afraid this is a very long email, but I want to tell you about the wonderful trip my husband Karl and I made to Saratov in May to find out more about Karl's Volga-German ancestry. His father, Gottfried Brandt, came from the village of Kraft. His wife and children were all deported to Kazakhstan in 1941, but Gottfried served as a translator in the German army. We don't know how or why. He settled in the west after the war and remarried, believing his family were dead. He had two sons, one being my husband. We live in London. We had intended to join John Klein's tour in Moscow, but when that could not run, we decided to go on our own as we had already booked our flights to Russia and back. The London travel agent who booked our hotels and arranged visas asked why on earth we wanted to go to Saratov! I bought the Lonely Planet guidebook and a Russian phrasebook, did lots of internet research, and hoped we would manage to arrange things on arrival. We consulted David R. Shultheiss's article, "Kraft - My birthplace and hometown as I remember it" (AHSGR Journal Vol.10, No1, Spring 1987) and David Bowland's account of his visit to Kraft in 1995 from www.webbitt.com, both fascinating. Ten days before our departure I emailed Vera Bjelkova-Miller, whom I "knew” from this list, asking for any contacts. She put us in touch with Saratov travel agent Vladimir Manykin and archaeologist Dmitri Barinov. Vladimir arranged our train tickets from Moscow to Saratov and met us at the station. Our room in the Hotel Slovakia overlooked the Volga and the bridge between Saratov and Engels, which was thrilling. Vladimir translated and explained the significance of some documents we got from relations from Kazakhstan, now living in Germany. These indicate that Gottfried and family left the Volga-German area some time between 1930 and 1934 for a village near Rostov-on-the-Don. So straight away we discovered that information about how Gottfried joined the German army would not be found in Saratov. We visited the Saratov museum on our first day, including the section on German local history. The next day we drove 150km with Dmitri and our excellent translator Oksana Kandrashkina to Kraft. The two articles on Kraft mentioned above were very useful, and David Shultheiss's map really helped. It was moving for my husband to walk the streets of his father's village and sit at a desk in the school his father attended in the early 20th century. David Shultheiss described a thriving village of 4,000 inhabitants in 1926; now it has about 600. It appeared that most were away working somewhere else. The teachers in the school were very helpful and showed us various documents about past pupils and took us to find German residents. One man was too deaf to hear what we were saying and the others had originally lived elsewhere before the war or were too young to remember the village, but it was still good to talk to them and hear their stories. We were told that earlier V-G returnees to Kraft had since migrated to Germany. It would have been good to know which house Gottfried and family had lived in. Dmitri showed us the entrance to ice-houses and other archeological details. After an enjoyable picnic lunch we went to the cemetery and saw some post-war German graves, including those of two women with the surname Brandt - probably a distant relation of ours. We saw that the earlier German graves had had their headstones removed. Our experience of the now poor and run-down village was very similar to David Bowland's. On Tuesday Vladimir took us to meet charismatic Mrs Erina of the Volga German archive in Engels. We were fascinated to hear how she has preserved and built up the archive. She showed us the records for Kraft village in 1763 with the name Jurgen Brandt, son of peasants, who married Maria Magdalena Rodberg - presumably Gottfried's ancestors. We spent Wednesday with Vladimir in Marks. The Lutheran cathedral now holds services again. Inside we met a woman who spoke German with an accent that my husband recognised as being eerily like the strong Frankfurt accent he spoke as a child. She was six in 1941, and kept reading the bible so as not to lose her mother-tongue. She said the congregation is now a few hundred - some V-G returnees, some Ukrainians. We walked around this once bustling town with its multitude of wooden-shuttered German houses and came upon one brick house whose interior was being decorated. The man and his wife allowed us in, and we were pleased to see all the original brass window fittings and removable inner window frames still intact. In the cemetery we saw large numbers of V-G graves and family vaults whose headstones had been removed or knocked down, though we were able to read some. Marks and its cemetery reinforced the feeling of a lost culture that has been almost erased from history. . . Vladimir has a PhD in Volga German dialects and a wealth of knowledge about V-G history, which really enhanced our visit. He told us that about 20,000 returnees had come back to the Volga after 1976. The German government was willing to put huge investment into the area to encourage the returnees to stay, e.g. setting up a Volkswagen plant to provide employment. But it didn't happen, partly because a terrible xenophobic campaign was whipped up against returning V-Gs and so the drift to Germany began. I think this is how Vladimir became a travel agent, helping whole families to migrate during the 1990s. That evening we were privileged to be invited to dinner at home with the family of our translator Oksana. They had become interested in our story. This memorable meal was one of the highlights of our visit! We tried to meet Professor Pleve, but he was unavailable at the time. The rest of our time was spent visiting other sights in Saratov, including a short boat trip on the Volga and an organ concert at the Conservatoire. We became really fond of the city and disagreed with the (historically inaccurate) guidebook's estimate that it was worth only one day's visit. We also had two fascinating days each in Moscow and Volgograd and St Petersburg. Our research now has to move to Rostov and perhaps German army records. We have a lot of people to thank for help in making our trip so wonderful. I want to thank John Klein for inspiring us to go in the first place. Start saving your pennies right now if you are thinking of taking his tour next year! I would like to thank Vera for her invaluable suggestions. We would like to thank Vladimir and Oksana from Primavera Travel Agency (www.primavera-tk.ru) for their excellent arrangements and would recommend them to anyone needing their services. Thanks to Dmitri for helping us connect with Gottfried's world. Thanks to Mrs Erina for preserving an endangered history. My husband is German (and we are in contact with relatives from Kazakhstan who have migrated to Germany) but we live in London and my German still needs improvement. Signing up to the GER-Volga list about 18 months ago opened the whole world of the Volga Germans to us. So I would like to thank everyone involved with maintaining and contributing to the list, to the associated research, to the AHSGR, volgagermans.net, webbitt.com, the writers of books, maps etc. which we have ordered as a result of all the information found in these various sources. It seems to me amazing and wonderful that uncovering Russian-German family history from England has taken us via America! Clare Cowen-Brandt