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.
