PoW gets his life back after 55 years (2000)

Perhaps an enterprising HN reader will do some research and flesh out the wikipedia article.

Any 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.

looking over the history of the Wiki edits, it could be something the original author of the page made up

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A1s_Toma&...

> 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.

Some 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

Ok, we've changed the article to that from 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.) 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.

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&so...

Agree.

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 :(

It 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

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_Sov...

> 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.

At 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

Truly 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.

> 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_...

When would get the opportunity while locked up in a psych hospital where everyone thinks you're crazy because you speak 'gibberish'?

I’ve seen Chinese and Pakistani people that have lived in New York City for 30+ years and don’t speak a lick of English. Their situation is different though since they have a local community to rely on that speak the same language.

He was in a Russian psychiatric hospital.

Psychiatric hospitals in many countries are an extension of the prison system.

A mental hospital probably isn't a good place to pick up a language, especially if everyone is convinced you can't speak sensibly and your teeth are gone. [Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1]

It seems like the hospital workers didn't really care enough to talk to him/to make conversation or even to teach him Russian words like "bed", "toilet", etc.

Even having basic vocabulary, it's impossible to have a meaningful conversation...

You don't just learn a language by osmosis. You need resources, and people to work with you.

It seems like sadly he got very little social interaction in the hospital.

You're thinking about being part of the society, nog being locked up 24/7 in a single room, and surrounded by people who care about you as much as the office potted plant.

I spent nearly 4 years in a country and barely learnt a thing, everything I knew was from online courses or internet forums.

Even then people still respond to me in English and having a conversation was incredibly hard without paying someone for tutoring, I'd seek out very old shopkeepers to practice some brief interactions but that only gets you so far.

Exposure is nowhere near enough to learn.

I grew up in a small city in upstate NY where a lot of eastern Europeans immigrated in the early 20th century up until the second war. Going to my friends' houses in the 80s - it was normal for the extended family to all live under one roof - there were a few families with grandparents who did not speak any English at all, and only spoke Czech, Hungarian, or Polish. Of course, the people these non-English speakers did business with on a daily basis for most of their lives in the US were speakers of those languages, and they could also rely on their children - my friends' parents - to translate.

I 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."

Terry Davis said that?

He 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.

Sadly 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.

Me too but in fairness "Prisoner of War" doesn't come up in normal life all that much either.