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Archiver > HUNGARY > 2000-08 > 0965531602
From: "Linda Edwards" <>
Subject: [HUNGARY-L] Fw: POW forgotten in Russian psychiatric hospital wants to go home after 53 years(he is hungarian)
Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 23:13:22 -0400
I thought this would be appropriate to post on this list.
Our local newspaper ran a story today and thought maybe genealogists might be able to help.
>From the Lexington Herald Leader, Saturday August 5, 2000, Lexington Kentucky.
By Yekaterina Trunova AP
Kotelnich, Russia--- He has spent the last 53 years trapped in time, never leaving the confines of a small psychiatric hospital in provincial Russia, with no identity, fading memories and a language nobody understood.
The man now believed to be a Hungarian taken prisoner by Soviet troops during World War II, was brought to the hospital in Kotelnich on Feb. 19, 1947, records show.
Seated Thursday on his hospital bed one of about a dozen in the room, he said he wants to return to Hungary, but the Hungary he remembers is the war-torn land of the mid-1940's.
"I don't know where I will live, because everything has been bombed," the patient, whose name is ANDRAS ANDREYEVICH TAMAS according to Soviet-era records, told The Associated Press. He spoke through a translator.
A Hungarian doctor who examined TAMAS last month hopes to get him to his homeland for treatment as quickly as possible, where surrounded by his mother tongue, the doctor believes the 75-year-old will recover his memory.
In Budapest, Hungarian Foreign Ministry spokesman Gabor Horvath said Thursday that TAMAS may be brought back to Hungary this month. But just who would welcome him is unclear. No record of TAMAS' birth or any living relative has been found, the spokesman said.
TAMAS was among prisoners of war sent by train from western Russia to a prison camp in Siberia, records indicate. The prisoner was suffering from psychological problems, so guards took him off the train when it passed near Kotelnich and left him at the hospital.
"They delivered him, left him here, and never asked about he background. Unable to speak Russian, TAMAS could not communicate with hospital staffers, who mistook his Hungarian for gibberish.
For five decades, TAMAS was left forgotten in the small provincial hospital. Time stopped for him in 1947.
By the 1960's, TAMAS had recovered sufficiently to work in the hospital workshop and walk the grounds, overgrown with trees and shrubs. He never learned to speak Russian.
TAMAS' Hungarian became garbled after decades of having no one to talk to, and only started to come back after the first hints of his identity came out last year.
A Russian police major of Hungarian descent, Karl Maravchuk, came to live in Kotelnich in 1997. He happened to sit next to Petukhov at a dinner party, and the doctor asked him to meet the mysterious patient.
"(TAMAS) began to understand the words that I was saying to him," said Maravchuk, who now translates for the patient. "And it turned out that he is a Hungarian,"
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