András Toma (5 December 1925 – 30 March 2004) was a Hungarian soldier taken prisoner by the Red Army in 1945, then discovered living in a Russian psychiatric hospital in 2000. He was probably the last prisoner of war from the Second World War to be repatriated.^[1]

Because Toma never learned Russian and nobody at the hospital spoke Hungarian, he had apparently not had a single conversation in over 50 years, a situation of great interest for the fields of psychiatry and psycholinguistics.^{[citation needed]}

Life[edit]

Toma lost his mother when he was four years old. He lived in the hamlet of Sulyánbokor, near Nyíregyháza, when he was drafted in 1944. His regiment fought around Auschwitz and Kraków. Toma was captured on 11 January 1945 and taken through Ukraine and Belarus to the Boksitogorsk (Бокситогорск) POW camp near Saint Petersburg. Due to illness, he was taken from Boksitogorsk to a military hospital at another camp in Bystryagi [ru] (Быстряги) 1,000 km further east. In January 1947, he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Kotelnich (Котельнич). Since those in hospitals were removed from prisoner of war lists, Toma was lost to Hungarian authorities. He was declared dead in 1954.^[2]

Toma lived under the name András Tamás (Андраш Тамаш). A Czech linguis