Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
PoW gets his life back after 55 years (2000) (theguardian.com)
292 points by supermatou on Sept 30, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 110 comments



It's frustrating to read that this is 'a situation of great interest for the fields of psychiatry and psycholinguistics', but not any results/commentary, or even any indication that his situation was actually studied (vs. greatly interesting but ignored).


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&...


Someone making facts up on Wikipedia would be of great interest for the fields of psychiatry and psycholinguistics.


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.


I don't think that is historically accurate.

He becomes a research interest after he is repatriated in 2000. (For the simple reason that before that he was believed to be just a non-verbal psychiatric patient. There are many of those.)

That is well after the dissolution of the USSR and the fall of the Iron Curtain.


You'd think that being there that long, someone would pick up at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language. Especially in a hospital with nothing else to do.


And he did. If you check the Guardian article[1] it says: "He had learned only a few Russian words..." and "his pronunciation of often old-fashioned Hungarian, dotted with occasional Russian, is hard to follow."

1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1


Hungary was in the Eastern bloc, so he was considered from a friendly nation ( that is after Hungarian revolution was brutally repressed by the Soviet forces)


"...about 600,000 Hungarians were taken to the Soviet Union as prisoners during and after the second world war."

"He probably took part in the joint German/Hungarian defence of Nyiregyhaza."

"Many of the wartime Hungarian prisoners were civilians, rounded up on the streets by the conquering Russian army and transported east in cattle-trucks to rebuild the Soviet Union. One in three of them died of cold, disease, and malnutrition."

The Soviets had different ideas of what "friends" meant.


This reminds me of a joke I once read somewhere:

A Polish man and a Russian man were walking on a road when they stumbled upon a treasure chest.

"What a fortune! Let's divide like friends!", exclaimed the Russian.

"Nah, let's just each have a half.", replied the less excited Pole.


Well, they were treated not better or worse than millions of its own citizens who were sent to Siberia. Including soviet pows who were automatically labeled traitors and sent to gulags.


If Russia is your friend, you don’t need enemies.


The Wikipedia page doesn't give juicy information. I think we can go to [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1


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...


Not wanting to disagree with mods as it's rarely a good look, but in this case, nobody would know why to (and so probably wouldn't) click through with its original title, and the change doesn't appear to meet the English definition of the word editorialize as it's about as flatly descriptive of the point of interest about this man as you can get.


You can disagree! We don't hold that against anyone.

Your point is good. There's no set of rules that works every time.

I think the root issue is that the Wikipedia article just wasn't the best submission for this story. There were a number of other articles about Mr. Toma's story on the web. Picking the best of those would have been a better strategy, and then the title issue would most likely have taken care of itself.


> 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


How sad, to fall through the cracks in such a spectacular way.

There have been so many appeals for help and obvious missed-test cases posted here by people. I can only dread the number of people who will experience such horrible fates again when there is another world war.

Services and systems for which no user-accessible help exists, completely automated interfaces designed by people without knowledge of the end users actual use and only through public outcry is an operator directed to edit some database manually or restore someones account or access to funds.


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...


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 :(


What do you mean by locked away? He could have left, it didn't say it was a forensic psychiatry.


Psychiatric hospitals in Russia/USSR (психушка) are virtually prisons, they were often used to involuntarily hold political prisoners.


> Psychiatric hospitals in Russia/USSR (психушка) are virtually prisons, they were often used to involuntarily hold political prisoners.

Indeed. The fact that no-one among the entire staff of the hospital over all those decades endeavored even to identify the patient's only language tells you that it was not a hospital.


Yeah, even in the US people used to get trapped in psychiatric hospitals. It wasn't until the law chipped away at the legal ability to keep patients that changed.


Another link someone posted said for the first 30+ years, there were other Hungarian patients he could speak to, so it isn't like they didn't know.


Good luck getting out of a psychiatric hospital when nobody understands a word you are saying.


Even if they do there are famous stories about how hard it is to be seen as sane the moment it's suspected you're not.

For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment


My objection to your previous message is that you must be assuming he was locked away. If this was the case, why was he let go to Hungary?


> A Czech linguist of Slovak descent, Karol Moravčík, identified him as Hungarian, and on 11 August 2000, Toma arrived back in Hungary where his family was identified through DNA matching.

Someone else recognized the language he was speaking, and that it wasn't actually gibberish (and so he wasn't some crazy old man).


Oh they knew, they just did not care. Eventually someone got the guy on camera and people started to ask questions.


And how exactly do you want to know that?


There are different types of patients in psychiatric hospitals. It depends on the institution but usually the majority of them are not psychotic at all but rather have affective disorders, personality disorders or addictions (or a combination). They can exist in the outside world just fine if there's a fitting place for them, think of a cocaine or alcohol addict that even manages to keep up with their high income career. There just wasn't a place for him - until he was repatriated.

It is really shocking that he never picked up Russian. I understand that Russian and Hungarian are almost as different as Japanese and Hungarian, but he should be able to learn the language just by hearing it.


I think he didn't pick Russian because the staff didn't bother to talk to him. So he didn't have much to hear.


He was let go to Hungary after fifty-three years, when a Czech visitor coincidentally discovered that he spoke Hungarian.


Still that is not what we understand under "locked away".


Presumably after the collapse of the USSR Russia stopped using psychiatric hospitals as alternatives to gulags/prisons?


Not systematically, but those still were the same institutions, with same staff and management, same warm and welcoming care traditions, etc. So I'm not sure their approach changed drastically.


Right. At least for some time...


They just seem to be fine with putting dissidents into normal prisons these days?

Something even the USSR was pussyfooting around in its later stages…


send us some sources


Russia is quite known of moving people to rural areas from another country they are at war with.

Displacing locals and moving Russians in, they claim the local population is ethnic Russians...

Getting away is not easy


> 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.


I'm a bit surprised it does get this many upvotes. The wikipedia article is a stub. The guardian article quoted (and posted here in the comments) doesn't do a good job detailing the exact situation he found himself in. For example what (if any) mental issues he might have had to be kept in the hospital, to what degree he was intelligible when talking (even to someone speaking Hungarian), to what degree he even tried to communicate, in what way he was treated or might have been medicated, etc...

Without any of this information the story is a bit of interesting trivia, little more, and provides very little to discuss in my opinion. The quality of comments so far reflect this lack of substance.

And just to make sure: None of what I said is meant to belittle his situation from a personal/human perspective.


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


When my mother in law died we cleaned a lot of old stuff out of her house. She had been born in 1944 and never knew her father who had also been drafted in ‘44 when the Germans were down to drafting essential personnel (a 38 year old railroad worker in his case — same as my grandad on the opposite side!).

Anyway we found a trove of letters her mum had written to the Red Cross every single month from 1945 to 1963 asking about her husband, and stack of responses that said “we have no info”.

The last letter simply read “<his name and ID number> died in such-and-such-a-town in Siberia 1956.” There was no other info.


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.


> After the war, German soldiers were passed around to be used as slave labor by the Allies

Really? I never heard of this except USSR.

I know that in the early months after the war the general populace was forced not just to tour death camps but sometimes bury bodies, and that during the war, western countries like Canada had enlisted men do some farming, but as far as I know the western allies tried to disgorge their PoWs as quickly as possible because they were a cost.

Can you point me to references otherwise?

Certainly USA, UK, and USSR “recruited” German scientists and spies post war, and how much free will they felt or did have in the matter can be questioned. But I don’t think any of them were slaves.



The Russian version of the Wikipedia page [1] shares a little bit more information on him. Particularly, that he did indeed have some conversations during his hospital time in Russia.

[1] https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%...


How do you not learn a local language after 50 years? Were they also not talking around him?

I don't think I have any special facility with language, but I'm fairly convinced if I had 50 years and the right vocal abilities to make the sounds, I could learn to speak a language from another planet if I were immersed in it.


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]


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.


Similarly, I knew a Polish guy who couldn't speak any English after 25 years in London. He once told me "Owen is dead". I had no idea who Owen was but figured it must have been a friend of his. He must've seen by the look of sympathy on my face that I didn't understand, so he beckoned me into the kitchen and pointed at the oven - "Owen".


I'm an Eastern European myself. Come on! This is really is just nitpicking some unimportant details of pronunciation. It's understandable enough.


Plot twist: Owen was in the oven.


I'm married to an immigrant who learned her first English as an adult. I have seen a clear pattern: Those who marry someone who speaks their native language rarely learn much English--they can communicate with their spouse and the community is enough for most other needs. Those who marry someone who doesn't speak their native language learn at least enough English to reasonably communicate with their spouse. It's a much greater driving force.

My wife speaks decidedly broken English (to be expected in someone who learned their first word of English at 43 and didn't even know our alphabet until adulthood), yet now and then she ends up acting as an interpreter for those with even less English than she has.


Spouse or people that need to provide. Invariably the man in the family ends up knowing English unless he’s old and depends on his son.


Disagree. I know multiple providers that speak very little English. There is enough of a Chinese community here that they can work in Chinese businesses where the lack of English isn't a big handicap.


I have no doubt people can stay in linguistic pockets if they want.

I just can't imagine making it past year 1 somewhere nobody spoke my language and not deciding, "I guess I'd better figure this out."


Try imagining being a prisoner in a soviet psychiatric "hospital"...


> 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_...


Another surprising fact that the guy managed to live so long. Not many survived long in soviet psychiatric hospitals, the conditions there were horrific.


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


fwiw according to Russian news[0] workers knew he was Hungarian, and reached out to Hungarian officials to claim him, but didn't hear back. According to article at the time when Hungary was prepping to join EU, ex nazi PoW was not a priority.

He only was "rediscovered", when Russian hospital personnel got him speaking Hungarian on camera for Russian news, and eventually news segment was picked up in Hungary and 80 Hungarian families came forward to claim him as a missing relative.

[0] https://ren.tv/news/lifestyle/887400-poslednii-plennyi-vtoro...


The article also says the Hungarian side later confirmed he did have a mental illness but it's RenTV which is not a very trustable source so one should take it with a grain of salt.


After fifty years locked up, of course he had a mental illness. It's amazing he was still sapient.


Unfortunately, I think it's likely that many of us would have mental problems if we went fifty years without talking to another human.


He was in a Russian psychiatric hospital.

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


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


Is that how you learnt English (or whatever your first language is) then, not metaphorical osmosis but by sitting down as a small child with lots of resources and people to work with you in deliberate study?

It's proven to be harder as we age, but it absolutely does work like that. I would assume Toma didn't more because of little interaction, not hearing dialogue around him, etc.

(And also just because it typically works like that doesn't mean he couldn't have been unusually predisposed against it, or genuinely ill, or too traumatised/uninterested/deliberately disengaging.)


I'd argue that children actually do put in a lot of effort. Parents sit down and teach the kids stuff, and kids are motivated to try and remember things their friends say to them. No empirical evidence though, just a thought.


Parents read picture books to children, play little games to reinforce the associations etc.


It's not automatic, but I can't imagine not trying. Maybe for the first year, you hold out hope of going back, but after that, if people are talking around you, do you not try? If you hear them use the same word for the same thing every time, don't you learn it? Don't you find ways to ask?


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 guess maybe I have more facility than I thought. I only spent a month in France, but could do basic things like order food, give directions, or follow a basic friendly conversation, even if I got by with incorrectly conjugated verbs and hand gestures.

In Germany, it was less than two weeks and I could pick up the flow of the sentences even if I still lacked almost all the vocabulary.

I assume it would take longer somewhere with a totally different language structure, like if you dropped me off in Japan, never mind another planet, but 50 years?

After at most a year, I'd have to resign myself to, "I guess I just live here now," and get to work.


I have enough to get by with the basics, but that took concerted effort on my part rather than simply being around it a lot. Nearly everyone would see me as an opportunity to practice English rather than speak in their native tongue, people would switch from one language to the next and not skip a beat to greet me in English.

If everyone in Japan spoke English as a second language you might have a harder time than you think at working on it.


I didn't say simply being around it a lot would pick it up automatically, but you're not the only person to read that into my original post.

Within the first week, I'd be paying close attention to everything people around me said, listening for patterns. Within a month, I would at least be trying to talk to them, albeit probably terribly.

A situation like yours where most people will speak to you in your native language is totally different than one where nobody does for 50 years. If you don't make learning the language they are speaking a high priority sometime in that span, that's not all on them.


To quote:

> I could learn to speak a language from another planet if I were immersed in it.

Maybe others and I misinterpreted but it very much came across as "I would learn it simply by being there"


Oh, I see how it could read that way. I meant it in juxtaposition to a situation where I was not immersed in it, like if they had an easy way to make things accessible to me in my own language instead.

If my only options were "learn this new-to-me language" and "never speak to anybody again" because I was immersed in the new language, I could learn it. It wouldn't happen automatically, but I could do it.

And over 50 years, I can't imagine not doing it. It would be my very top priority after meeting my physical needs well enough to stay alive.


> Even then people still respond to me in English

Netherlands?


Sweden?


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...


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.


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.


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


spider robinson had a short story, "the time traveller", based on the premise that emerging from years of that sort of isolation (i think it was ten years in the case of his protagonist) was tantamount to travelling forward in time.


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."


I wonder what his inner experience was like those 50 years. Terry said that when your life is empty, God gives you clairvoyance to fill the void. Wonder if it was the same for this guy.


Terry Davis said that?


If this is of great interest for the fields of psychiatry and psycholinguistics I'm happy to volunteer.


They must've done that intentionally. You can't tell me he wouldn't have been able to communicate through drawing, writing or some sort of made up sign language that he's hungarian or that he's mentally well.


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.


Title means Prisoner of War, for anyone else tainted by modernity and thought of Proof of Work. (Here's towards hoping that PoW will rarely have to refer to the title's definition henceforth)


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.


Thought this was some ‘Proof of Work thing’. Def need a break from HN.


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


Sadly in recent years it has definitely surpassed Proof of Work as a discussion topic.


There was a time before language was invented.


... and dies four years later.


Must have been a fellow HN reader!


[flagged]


"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37720767.


They don't care. The function of those institutions isn't to heal people, it's to warehouse them where they won't cause trouble, or sometimes punish those who did cause trouble. It's not that expensive if you pay pennies (or kopecks) to the medical personnel, use the cheapest food that could be found and basically run it as a prison, but with pills and syringes.


>economically unviable and offer suicide like Canada apparently does...

Hi, Canadian here.

Having asked... 4? different professionals multiple times for MAID and being denied each time it isn't that easy to get if 'you're just mentally ill'. I wish it was, but that's another debate. Sorry to burst your bubble.


Ah fuck off, why are you picking on Canada suddenly. It has no relevancy whatsoever to that story.


Could you offer a citation for that last part?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada#Controver...

(Filter to sources if that's your inclination)

iirc it's a reference to a receptionist at the veteran's affairs in Canada, it was claimed they offered an assisted suicide kit to a veteran who requested a stair lift -- the VA later investigated and found no record of the offer. Either that or another (never verified, only alleged) case of this same scenario but with a veteran who asked for help with PTSD.

These two anecdotes come up somewhat often on HN, usually vaguely alluded to rather than explicitly called out.


Healthcare system in USSR was `something`, as you can tell.


he just like me fr fr




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: