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PoW gets his life back after 55 years (2000)
- ftxbro 3y agohe just like me fr fr
- Xeoncross 3y agoHow sad, to fall through the cracks in such a spectacular way. There have been so many appeals for help and obvious missed-test cases posted here by people. I can only dread the number of people who will experience such horrible fates again when there is another world war. Services and systems for which no user-accessible help exists, completely automated interfaces designed by people without knowledge of the end users actual use and only through public outcry is an operator directed to edit some database manually or restore someones account or access to funds.
- codetrotter 3y agoAgree. Even with this > since his military service had been continuous, his decades of accumulated unpaid salary were paid in full It’s still nothing, compared to having been locked away in a foreign country for almost his whole adult life :(
- xkcd1963 3y agoWhat do you mean by locked away? He could have left, it didn't say it was a forensic psychiatry.
- masfuerte 3y agoGood luck getting out of a psychiatric hospital when nobody understands a word you are saying.
- xkcd1963 3y agoMy objection to your previous message is that you must be assuming he was locked away. If this was the case, why was he let go to Hungary?
- H8crilA 3y agoThere are different types of patients in psychiatric hospitals. It depends on the institution but usually the majority of them are not psychotic at all but rather have affective disorders, personality disorders or addictions (or a combination). They can exist in the outside world just fine if there's a fitting place for them, think of a cocaine or alcohol addict that even manages to keep up with their high income career. There just wasn't a place for him - until he was repatriated. It is really shocking that he never picked up Russian. I understand that Russian and Hungarian are almost as different as Japanese and Hungarian, but he should be able to learn the language just by hearing it.
- smsm42 3y agoI think he didn't pick Russian because the staff didn't bother to talk to him. So he didn't have much to hear.
- apt-get 3y ago> A Czech linguist of Slovak descent, Karol Moravčík, identified him as Hungarian, and on 11 August 2000, Toma arrived back in Hungary where his family was identified through DNA matching. Someone else recognized the language he was speaking, and that it wasn't actually gibberish (and so he wasn't some crazy old man).
- ahoka 3y agoOh they knew, they just did not care. Eventually someone got the guy on camera and people started to ask questions.
- 3y ago
- xkcd1963 3y ago[flagged]
- vilunov 3y agoPsychiatric hospitals in Russia/USSR (психушка) are virtually prisons, they were often used to involuntarily hold political prisoners.
- adonovan 3y ago> Psychiatric hospitals in Russia/USSR (психушка) are virtually prisons, they were often used to involuntarily hold political prisoners. Indeed. The fact that no-one among the entire staff of the hospital over all those decades endeavored even to identify the patient's only language tells you that it was not a hospital.
- flashback2199 3y agoYeah, even in the US people used to get trapped in psychiatric hospitals. It wasn't until the law chipped away at the legal ability to keep patients that changed.
- smeej 3y agoAnother link someone posted said for the first 30+ years, there were other Hungarian patients he could speak to, so it isn't like they didn't know.
- NicoJuicy 3y agoRussia is quite known of moving people to rural areas from another country they are at war with. Displacing locals and moving Russians in, they claim the local population is ethnic Russians... Getting away is not easy
- fiforpg 3y agoIt does not take a world war to destroy people's lives like that, unfortunately. That is, malevolence is not necessary, incompetence is enough. Both are abundant in autocratic, repressive societies, such as the Soviet Union in this case. Another example that comes to mind is the story of Romanian orphans under Ceaușescu, where thousands grew up in orphanages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans More broadly of course, half of the Soviet history is that of displaced small nations (see Crimean Tatars, Soviet Greeks, Ukrainians, Poles, etc), where often the fate of an entire ethnic group was not unlike the fate of this man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
- trvz 3y ago> I can only dread the number of people who will experience such horrible fates again when there is another world war. Or, you know, the hundreds of thousands of children abducted out of Ukraine right now. The man in the story was 19 when it happened. How much will a 9 year old remember of their home? Any child under perhaps ~5 years is now lost forever. Russia is a vile evil.
- wslh 3y agoThe Wikipedia page doesn't give juicy information. I think we can go to [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1
- afterburner 3y ago> When he was told that he was going to be shown films about the second world war, he moved his chair to the very back of the room - only to be disappointed by his first encounter with television and its tiny images. Lol, expecting a movie theatre, guess he was a back-row guy.
- praisewhitey 3y agoSome more information from the reporting at the time >He had never learned Russian, and has lived the last 20 years in linguistic isolation after the last other Hungarian patients left the hospital in 1980. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/860033.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/860033.stm
- dang 3y agoOk, we've changed the article to that from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Toma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Toma. Thanks! Submitters: Wikipedia links are fine if there really isn't a more substantial or engaging article about the topic somewhere on the web, but please try to find one first. Also, please don't editorialize the title. (This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.) The submitted title was "The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years" which is not at all the title of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Toma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Toma. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- Clamchop 3y ago
- smeej 3y agoHow do you not learn a local language after 50 years? Were they also not talking around him? I don't think I have any special facility with language, but I'm fairly convinced if I had 50 years and the right vocal abilities to make the sounds, I could learn to speak a language from another planet if I were immersed in it.
- avereveard 3y ago> discovered living in a Russian psychiatric hospital I don't think you fully realize the extent of the meaning of that few words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
- myth_drannon 3y agoAnother surprising fact that the guy managed to live so long. Not many survived long in soviet psychiatric hospitals, the conditions there were horrific.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- crooked-v 3y agoWhen would get the opportunity while locked up in a psych hospital where everyone thinks you're crazy because you speak 'gibberish'?
- romanzubenko 3y agofwiw according to Russian news[0] workers knew he was Hungarian, and reached out to Hungarian officials to claim him, but didn't hear back. According to article at the time when Hungary was prepping to join EU, ex nazi PoW was not a priority. He only was "rediscovered", when Russian hospital personnel got him speaking Hungarian on camera for Russian news, and eventually news segment was picked up in Hungary and 80 Hungarian families came forward to claim him as a missing relative. [0] https://ren.tv/news/lifestyle/887400-poslednii-plennyi-vtoroi-mirovoi-55-let-vengerskogo-soldata-v-rossii https://ren.tv/news/lifestyle/887400-poslednii-plennyi-vtoro...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Janicc 3y agoThey must've done that intentionally. You can't tell me he wouldn't have been able to communicate through drawing, writing or some sort of made up sign language that he's hungarian or that he's mentally well.
- lostlogin 3y agoHe was taken as a prisoner and likely had little idea what was going on in the wider world. I can imagine that cooperating may have be the last thing he wanted to do initially.
- Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 3y agoI'm a bit surprised it does get this many upvotes. The wikipedia article is a stub. The guardian article quoted (and posted here in the comments) doesn't do a good job detailing the exact situation he found himself in. For example what (if any) mental issues he might have had to be kept in the hospital, to what degree he was intelligible when talking (even to someone speaking Hungarian), to what degree he even tried to communicate, in what way he was treated or might have been medicated, etc... Without any of this information the story is a bit of interesting trivia, little more, and provides very little to discuss in my opinion. The quality of comments so far reflect this lack of substance. And just to make sure: None of what I said is meant to belittle his situation from a personal/human perspective.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justinclift 3y agoAt some point the link has been changed to an article in the Guardian, which has more info: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1
- Kiro 3y agoIf this is of great interest for the fields of psychiatry and psycholinguistics I'm happy to volunteer.
- phkahler 3y ago[flagged]
- chupasaurus 3y agoHealthcare system in USSR was `something`, as you can tell.
- smsm42 3y agoThey don't care. The function of those institutions isn't to heal people, it's to warehouse them where they won't cause trouble, or sometimes punish those who did cause trouble. It's not that expensive if you pay pennies (or kopecks) to the medical personnel, use the cheapest food that could be found and basically run it as a prison, but with pills and syringes.
- elmomle 3y agoCould you offer a citation for that last part?
- chownie 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada#Controver... (Filter to sources if that's your inclination) iirc it's a reference to a receptionist at the veteran's affairs in Canada, it was claimed they offered an assisted suicide kit to a veteran who requested a stair lift -- the VA later investigated and found no record of the offer. Either that or another (never verified, only alleged) case of this same scenario but with a veteran who asked for help with PTSD. These two anecdotes come up somewhat often on HN, usually vaguely alluded to rather than explicitly called out.
- jsocuwl 3y agoAh fuck off, why are you picking on Canada suddenly. It has no relevancy whatsoever to that story.
- mark_up 3y ago[dead]
- zem 3y agospider robinson had a short story, "the time traveller", based on the premise that emerging from years of that sort of isolation (i think it was ten years in the case of his protagonist) was tantamount to travelling forward in time.
- qingcharles 3y agoI work with prisoners who get released. I just worked with a guy who got out after 40 years. It was interesting setting him up with a phone, debit card, bank account etc. He'd never had a bank account or ever paid taxes (the look on the woman's face at the Social Security office when she tried to pull up his tax returns...!). I had to show him how to use a debit card. It was basically like time travel for him. I did 10 years locked up, but the only thing that changed was that the Web had become totally "enshittified."
- OJFord 3y agoIt's frustrating to read that this is 'a situation of great interest for the fields of psychiatry and psycholinguistics', but not any results/commentary, or even any indication that his situation was actually studied (vs. greatly interesting but ignored).
- stathibus 3y agoPerhaps an enterprising HN reader will do some research and flesh out the wikipedia article.
- goalieca 3y agoAny research into the matter is complicated by the fact he was on the wrong side of the iron curtain. The USSR was no friend to honest inquiry.
- noduerme 3y agoYou'd think that being there that long, someone would pick up at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language. Especially in a hospital with nothing else to do.
- krisoft 3y agoAnd he did. If you check the Guardian article[1] it says: "He had learned only a few Russian words..." and "his pronunciation of often old-fashioned Hungarian, dotted with occasional Russian, is hard to follow." 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1
- krisoft 3y agoI don't think that is historically accurate. He becomes a research interest after he is repatriated in 2000. (For the simple reason that before that he was believed to be just a non-verbal psychiatric patient. There are many of those.) That is well after the dissolution of the USSR and the fall of the Iron Curtain.
- myth_drannon 3y ago
- mise_en_place 3y agoI wonder what his inner experience was like those 50 years. Terry said that when your life is empty, God gives you clairvoyance to fill the void. Wonder if it was the same for this guy.
- snovymgodym 3y agoTerry Davis said that?
- Freedom2 3y agoMust have been a fellow HN reader!
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThere was a time before language was invented.
- enterexit 3y agoThe Russian version of the Wikipedia page [1] shares a little bit more information on him. Particularly, that he did indeed have some conversations during his hospital time in Russia. [1] https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0,_%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%88?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%...
- contingencies 3y ago... and dies four years later.
- lemonish97 3y agoThought this was some ‘Proof of Work thing’. Def need a break from HN.
- gumby 3y agoWhen my mother in law died we cleaned a lot of old stuff out of her house. She had been born in 1944 and never knew her father who had also been drafted in ‘44 when the Germans were down to drafting essential personnel (a 38 year old railroad worker in his case — same as my grandad on the opposite side!). Anyway we found a trove of letters her mum had written to the Red Cross every single month from 1945 to 1963 asking about her husband, and stack of responses that said “we have no info”. The last letter simply read “<his name and ID number> died in such-and-such-a-town in Siberia 1956.” There was no other info.
- ungruntled 3y agoTruly tragic. After the war, German soldiers were passed around to be used as slave labor by the Allies (obviously Germans acted similarly with Allied PoWs during the war). Germans were expelled by the millions from culturally German areas. Not every Axis power received the same degree of treatment, which I assume is due to the higher level of vilification of Germans caused by wartime and continuing post wartime propaganda (obviously the Nazis created quite a bit of ammunition for this). I bring this up because we can observe this type of vilification in real-time by western media against Russians as well as the same propaganda against Ukrainians by Russian media. I'm hoping that once the conflict is over that Europe's experience makes this type of post-war pillaging distasteful.
- gumby 3y ago> After the war, German soldiers were passed around to be used as slave labor by the Allies Really? I never heard of this except USSR. I know that in the early months after the war the general populace was forced not just to tour death camps but sometimes bury bodies, and that during the war, western countries like Canada had enlisted men do some farming, but as far as I know the western allies tried to disgorge their PoWs as quickly as possible because they were a cost. Can you point me to references otherwise? Certainly USA, UK, and USSR “recruited” German scientists and spies post war, and how much free will they felt or did have in the matter can be questioned. But I don’t think any of them were slaves.
- lucb1e 3y agoTitle means Prisoner of War, for anyone else tainted by modernity and thought of Proof of Work. (Here's towards hoping that PoW will rarely have to refer to the title's definition henceforth)
- jen20 3y agoSadly thanks to the continuing existence of Russia, the same story as is here is likely to be played out hundreds or thousands of times over the next fifty years with Ukrainian children.