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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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