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.