World

Hungarian POW Heads Home

August 11, 2000 / 6:00 PM EDT / AP

A Hungarian prisoner deposited in a Russian psychiatric hospital after World War II and forgotten for five decades returned Friday to Hungary — a homeland he hasn't seen since the 1940s.

Andras Tamas, 75, flew to Budapest from Moscow aboard a Hungarian airliner and was rushed in a wheelchair past hundreds of reporters and onlookers to a van that took him to the National Psychiatric and Neurological Institute. He is expected to stay there for at least two months.

Several elderly people who suspect they may be his relatives were at the Budapest airport but were unable to speak to Tamas. One elderly woman rushed forward to give him flowers but was jostled aside.

Until Friday, Tamas had not set foot outside the hospital in the Russian town of Kotelnich since Soviet secret police brought him there as a young man in 1947. For years, no one knew who he was, and hospital staff mistook his Hungarian mutterings for gibberish.

An encounter with a Hungarian-speaking Russian unlocked the mystery. A Hungarian psychiatrist visited him in the hospital and came away convinced that Tamas was an ethnic Hungarian.

Hungarian authorities said they had still not uncovered enough about Tamas' background but decided to issue him a Hungarian passport and bring him home for humanitarian reasons.

A privately chartered double-decker bus rolled out of the hospital yard in Russia early Friday, embarking on a nearly daylong journey to carry Tamas and accompanying medical staff to Moscow. Doctors thought a bus trip to Moscow would be less stressful than a flight.

Seated by a window on the bus, Tamas stared nervously ahead, occasionally glancing around anxiously. He grew teary-eyed at times, and doctors said he felt ill.

No record of Tamas' birth or any living relative has been found, and his memories date to the ravaged Hungary of the war years.

Dr. Akos Barth, who accompanied Tamas from Moscow, said the elderly man said little on the flight. Barth said that when the plane landed, the doctor told him: "Look, we are back in Hungary.

"All he asked was 'when am I going to get my leg back?'" Barth said, referring to an amputated limb.

Tamas is believed to have been among the 150,000 Hungarian troops who fought under Nazi command at the Don River in 1944. Red Army soldiers killed about 90,000 Hungarians and thousands more died in freezing temperatures walking to Hungary.

Tamas was among prisoners of war sent by train from western Russia to a prison camp in Siberia, records indicate. He seemed to be suffering from psychological problems, so guards took him off the train and left him at the hospital.

Other than his name, Soviet-era records said nothing of his background. Unable to speak Russian, Tamas could not communicate with hospital staff. Later, somebody thought Tamas was Romanian, and that was written in his records.

For Tamas, time stopped in 1947.

"He has lived here for a long time, but all his impressions, all hi knowledge have remained at the level of (the) 1940s," the chief doctor of the Kotelnich hospital, Yuri Petukhov, said last week.

Doctors at Kotelnich had tried to figure out Tamas' past, but all documents seemed to have been lost in the tumultuous years after the war, Petukhov said.

Then a Russian police major of Hungarian descent, Karl Maravchuk, came to live in the town in 1991. Invited to the hospital by Petukhov, he recognized Tamas' speech as Hungarian. That got the ball rolling: Hungarian doctors were sent in and identified Tamas as a countryman.

On Friday, Petukhov accompanied Tamas to Budapest.

"Physically he's feeling good taking into account his age," Petukhov said at the Moscow airport. "He understands he's going to Hungary, he understands what's going on around him and that it's probably going to be better because he likes to interact with people."

The extent of Tamas' mental problems is unclear. Circulatory problems force the amputation of a leg above the knee about three years ago.

One Hungarian official in Russia said he is "mentally seriously damaged." But a Hungarian doctor who examined Tamas last month said he believes that in his homeland, surrounded by his mother tongue, Tamas will recover his memory.

Twenty Hungarian families have already offered to adopt him.