When Anna Gabulya saw a television report of a POW’s return to Hungary a half-century after he served during World War II, she noticed the resemblance immediately.
She saw in András Toma a likeness that reminded her of her late father. As she described to a Los Angeles Times reporter a year after Toma’s release in 2000, she struggled with whether to contact authorities and list herself as a potential relative.
Her husband strongly cautioned against it.
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“Do you want to end up making a fool of yourself?” Gabulya told the Times of what her husband said. “Six hundred families are claiming him as their own, and he’s going to end up being your brother?”
Ignoring her husband’s advice, Gabulya followed her instincts and reached out to Hungarian officials. As it turned out, DNA proved Toma was her long-lost brother.
Going Off to War
Hailing from Sulyánbokor, Hungary, near the border with Ukraine, Toma was always good with his hands. He served as a blacksmith’s apprentice before being drafted into the Hungarian army in 1944. Less than a year later, the Russian Red Army captured Toma, who fought in Poland — including near Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp, according to War History Online.
Widely considered the longest-held POW from World War II, Toma’s descent into hell began with a three-week journey by train to a prison camp near what is now St. Petersburg. Along with his comrades, the scared young man, incorrectly identified as András Tamas in Soviet records, was crammed inside the boxcar. They were treated horrifically, and some died during transport.
Their lifeless bodies were stacked on top of one another. With no other choice, Toma slept on top of corpses.
When he fell ill at the POW camp, the Soviets transferred him to a military hospital. By early 1947, two years after his capture, Toma was diagnosed with “psycho-neurosis” and shipped to a mental hospital in Kotelnich.
That was only the start of his ordeal.
Longtime POW Believed to Have Spoken Gibberish
While exact numbers vary, it is believed the Soviets captured hundreds of thousands of Hungarian soldiers during World War II. Most had been released by the mid-1950s, War History Online reported, but Toma wasn’t going anywhere.
Because the psychiatric ward was not affiliated with the Soviet military, Toma’s name was removed from POW rolls. Officially, there was no record of his existence. His situation only worsened because he knew very little Russian and none of the hospital staff members understood Hungarian. Believing he was speaking gibberish — believed to be another symptom of his supposed mental health issues — doctors kept him confined.
Declared dead in 1954, Toma said very few words in the ensuing decades as the language barrier became a bigger obstacle to overcome than any he faced on the battlefield, per War History Online. The POW was trapped in a facility where he did not belong.
Basically needing a miracle, or at least a stroke of good fortune, Toma received one when a Hungarian-speaking doctor visited the mental hospital, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported. The doctor recognized Toma’s dialect, the Hungarian Embassy became involved and the POW was transferred to a Hungarian hospital.
When he finally returned to his native country on Aug. 11, 2000, it became national news. The reunion with his sister Anna and brother Janos came a month later after more than 80 other families claimed some connection to Toma.
“Everybody in the room wept, including me,” Col. Laszlo Erdos, who had helped research Toma’s past and served as his interpreter, said in an article published in The Guardian.
Beamed his sister: “He looks exactly like his late father.”
A Difficult Acclimation Process
Toma provided clues that allowed officials to reunite him with his family. In his early 70s when he was released, there were understandably some holes in the POW’s memories of home. Still, Toma was able to tell authorities where he was born, where he went to school and about his time working for a blacksmith.
That trail of bread crumbs eventually led to the small village of Sulyánbokor, where Anna and her husband took her brother in. In the beginning, a frightened Toma’s new surroundings confused him. Gabulya, who was only 1 when Toma was drafted into the military, and her husband wondered how to navigate their new normal.
“When I wanted to stroke his arm, he’d say, ‘Don’t touch me!’” Gabulya recalled to the Times in an article published in October 2001.
“He’d eat breakfast silently and then say, ‘Let’s go.’ I said, ‘Go? There is nowhere to go. This is your home.’ I cried and cried and said, ‘My God, what’s going to be the end of this?’”
To the relief of everyone involved, Toma eventually adjusted. Recalling his decades-old training, Toma carved a handle out of a tree branch, the Times reported. He then began fixing the family’s broken tools, sometimes working on each one for days at a time.
Toma also made himself useful in other ways, watering the family’s flowers and cleaning and peeling vegetables for their meals. Still, no number of daily chores could wipe away the memories of what he endured. As chronicled in the Times article, Toma was asked who shaved him during his five-plus decades of detention. The freed man replied: “The witch with the steel teeth. She kicked me around in the toilet.”
After returning to Hungary, Toma was promoted to sergeant major and received military back pay for his years as a POW, according to War History Online. He lived with his sister’s family until his death on March 30, 2004, at the age of 78.
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