While spending any amount of time locked up in confinement is brutal for anybody,
it is especially so for prisoners of war who are now at the mercy of the people just days
or even moments before they were trying to kill. History is filled with tales of
brutality towards captured opponents and there is a wide variety of punishments
that can be meted out for those unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the enemy.
One of those punishments can simply be the length of time itself for prisoners to be released,
such as in the Vietnam War where US POWs sometimes waited for six, seven,
and even eight years before being returned to their homeland. While these times might seem
impossibly long for many, they actually do not come anywhere close to the longest time someone
has actually been held as a prisoner of war. That dubious record is held by a man named Andras
Toma who was a private in the Hungarian army and was captured by the Russians in World War Two,
going on to spend 55 years in captivity. But how does a private, the lowest ranking enlisted man,
stay locked up for decades after the war especially when the most senior leadership of
Germany and other Axis countries were all released within a decade of the end of World War Two?
In the final six months of World War Two, the situation in Europe was characterized by large,
chaotic battles and an incredibly fluid frontline. By the fall of 1944, the situation in the east
was not looking good for the Germans and their allies. Massive Soviet offensives finally pushed
enemy soldiers off Russian soil for the first time since 1941 and now the Russians were advancing in
all directions along the front. Here begins Toma’s story.
Toma was born in a small village called Ujfeherto in 1925 and grew up in the
village of Sulyanbokor. During his time in the village, he grew up with both of his parents
as well as one brother and one sister. Toma attended school in the small town and after
graduation became a blacksmith apprentice. It was here in the autumn of 1944 that army recruiters
came looking for him and forced him into the army. Little is known about his service in the Hungarian
army- which was allied with Hitler- during the war. He likely participated in the defense of
Nyiregyhaza, a larger Hungarian town not far from his childhood village. From there, it appears that
his unit was sent to Poland. There are differing accounts of when exactly he was captured with
some believing it was in the late fall of 1944 while some other accounts cite January 11, 1945,
as the day of his capture in Poland. From the moment he was captured,
Tomas’ ordeal was a living hell. It is likely that the Soviets rounded up survivors of his unit
and marched them to one of a series of over four thousand specially designed camps made exclusively
for prisoners of war. Often, the guards were brutal and were known to beat and kick prisoners
who were falling behind or for no reason at all. From here, the men were likely put on crowded
boxcars with up to sixty men in each car. The beds along the walls were usually only two deep
meaning those unlucky enough to not get one would have to sleep on the floor or stand up aimlessly
for hours until it was their turn for a break. There was usually a stove in the middle of the
car but fuel was scarce so the prisoners would freeze in the cold winter months like when Tomas
was captured. As for a bathroom, a small hole in the floor of the car was all that was provided.
Making matters worse was the intense pressure to get the prisoners to their final destination as
quickly as possible. The guards were under strict orders to provide the exact numbers
of prisoners reported and because of that would make few stops for food and water along the way.
During these rare moments, it was common for POWs to try and escape
but these men were always met with immediate gunfire from the guards in any such case.
The pressure to keep the exact number of prisoners also meant that whenever someone died or escaped
the guards would arrest any local citizens and take them along now as "prisoners of war" ensuring
that the car stays packed the entire way there. During the journey, it was here that the once
perfectly sane Toma began to show his first signs of mental illness. It was reported that because
of the intense timeline to get the camps as scheduled, those that died in the car from their
wounds, disease, thirst, or who were shot simply stayed in the car. Because of the lack of beds,
prisoners like Tomas were forced to sleep on top of the bodies of their dead comrades. By
the time the men reached Russia, Tomas had already begun to show the first signs of mental psychosis.
Regardless of when he was captured, the first records of his captivity come from a prisoner of
war camp outside Leningrad on January 25, 1945. Upon arrival, it was likely that he was sent to
the camp infirmary to see the medical doctor to address the mental breakdown he had suffered on
the trip. It was this day that would send him down the path towards his decades' long internment.
When presenting himself to the medical officer, he told him that his name was Andras Toma.
But because of the language barrier, misunderstanding, or even poor handwriting,
his name was recorded as Andras Tamas and this would be his new identity for years to come.
Compounding matters even worse was the fact that he was one of the few Hungarians captured
in a mostly German unit meaning he was left with few others to communicate with
since he spoke no German and very little Russian. His time at the prisoner of war camp was likely
very tough. At the end of World War Two, Stalin had told the other world leaders that because
of the incredible casualties his country had suffered during the war, he intended to keep
prisoners of war for as long as he could as forced laborers to rebuild the nation. Over four million
foreign prisoners were used for forced labor by the Soviets including at least 500,000 Hungarians.
The prisoners were utilized for a variety of projects which usually consisted of construction
or other manual labor jobs to rebuild the damaged infrastructure of the Soviet Union. It is unknown
which camps Tomas served in since the records for the time were sparse at best. To further
complicate matters, these records were kept under seal in the Russian archives until as recently as
only a few years ago when the Hungarian government received permission from the Russian government
to unseal the records of over 400,000 Hungarians who had survived captivity in the Soviet Union.
While it is unknown exactly which camp or camps Tomas served in, they were all without a doubt
miserable places to be. For one, upon arrival, the men were forced to give up their valuables.
These would either be pocketed by the guards or given to the local population since they were
often in little better shape than the prisoners. After arrival, the men would be expected to work
at least 8 but sometimes up to 14 hours a day. The punishments for escape could be brutal with some
camps giving immediate death sentences for anyone who tried. But even if Tomas could have escaped,
the locals were all told that even the Hungarians were war criminals
and were just as bad as the Germans, meaning little hope of someone taking pity on them.
The food in the camps was also universally poor with many Hungarians reporting that most meals
consisted of dry bread and some watered down soup. The men’s’ uniforms were reduced to rags and fuel
here was just as scarce on the transports in the winter. Often, prisoners would become
infected with lice and other vermin adding another layer of misery to the whole ordeal.
At the end of 1947, Soviet records show that his camp was shut down and he was
transferred to a Soviet psychiatric hospital in central Russia since the Russians claimed
he was schizophrenic but was likely suffering from PTSD from the years of abuse in the camps.
For unknown reasons, his name was struck from the official list of Hungarian prisoners at this point
and Tomas would now begin the next chapter of his internment living in obscurity.
Once at the hospital, Tomas tried to communicate with staff and fellow patients numerous times
both by speaking and writing but every time he was met with cold indifference.
His native tongue is unlike any other language in Europe and shares few common
roots with any one of them, making Hungarian a very unique and difficult to understand language
for those who are not familiar with it. Tomas’ fate would be locked in after 1954.
When the last batches of POWs were released he was officially declared dead by the Hungarian
government since his name was no longer on the list of confirmed POWs still alive.
During the decades Tomas spent at the hospital, he spent practically every moment alone.
He ate his meals while staring at the wall and worked some small jobs in the hospital to keep
himself occupied. Because of the repeated attempts at communication failing, Tomas resigned himself
to his fate and carried on each day hoping that one day someone would be able to understand him.
That day would take over fifty years. By 2000, new staff at the hospital decided that
they would attempt to communicate with Tomas. They did not believe that the language he was speaking
was some made-up gibberish as other doctors had claimed. They sought the help of one of Russia's
most renowned linguists to listen to him and see if he could identify the language. After
listening to Tomas, the linguist immediately identified the language as Hungarian and soon
thereafter contacted the Hungarian embassy. After positively identifying that he was
Hungarian and was not mentally disabled, the work of identifying who he was proved difficult.
Tomas had not had a prolonged conversation with anyone in over fifty years. Getting him to come
out of his shell was slow at first, but once several officers from the Hungarian army came to
visit him he began to open up more about his past. While it was hard to understand what he was saying
since he spoke an older, less-used dialect of Hungarian, the officers and medical staff began
to piece together facts of his life before the war. They then solicited information from the
public and over one hundred families came forward believing he could be
one of their long lost relatives. In the end, through a DNA test,
one of these families proved to be his actual relatives. It was his brother and sister who
had survived the war and were still living in the same village they had grown up in. Tomas,
after 55 years in captivity, was finally returned to his native Hungary to a hero’s welcome and 55
years of back pay for service in the army. But he would not have much time to catch up
with his family or enjoy the celebrity status and back pay given to him by the Hungarian government.
Sadly, in 2004, just over four years after he's released, he passed away at home.