Forgotten Prisoner Returns to Hungary

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.

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 in the early 1990s 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 still had not uncovered enough about Tamas’ background but decided to issue him a Hungarian passport and bring him home for humanitarian reasons.

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 trying to walk home to Hungary.

Tamas was among prisoners sent by train to Siberia, records show. He seemed to be suffering from psychological problems, so guards left him at the hospital.