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Comment by Xeoncross | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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?

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.

> 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?

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?

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…

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.

send us some sources

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

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.

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.

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