Hungarian held 50 years in Russia returns home

He said not one word, just looked around, apparently shocked by the crowd and cameras and feeling the effect of his long physical and emotional journey.

Tamas, who is aged about 75 years now, was recently found in a psychiatric hospital in the Russian town of Kotelnich, 700 km from Moscow, where he spent the last 53 years of his life in complete isolation from the world.

A doctor of Slovakian origin, who treated him, discovered that the old man spoke Hungarian words and contacted the Hungarian Red Cross — which eventually led to his homecoming.

"Treatment in a Hungarian language environment by Hungarian medical experts could help bring back his memories," Hungarian Foreign Ministry spokesman Gabor Horvath said.

The old world will come back to him, on the basis of which his personal identity can be established, he added.

"He is not psychiatrically ill, he has a hospitalisation syndrome," Horvath said.

Tamas, who never learned to speak Russian, lost his right leg in 1996 due to an infection.

Andras Veer, director of Hungary’s National Psychiatry and Neurology Institute, who had long sessions with Tamas in Kotelnich and will treat him in Hungary, said his rehabilitation will take maximum two months.

Tamas, who was probably born in the territory of former Czechoslovakia, needed a special permit to enter Hungary and stay until relatives are found and his identity proven, Veer added.

"Eight people turned up who claim to be his relatives," Veer said, adding that they must not be taken for granted and must be thoroughly checked as the surname Tamas was common in Hungary. Some of these potential relatives came to welcome Tamas at the airport, but he did not seem to recognise any of them.

"We have a document proving that in January 1945 he (Tamas) was in a camp for prisoners of war — that’s a fact," Veer said. "But we don’t have a clear picture about the period before that."

Tamas was brought from the Russian hospital to Moscowearlier on Friday by bus and taken straight to Sheremetyevo airport to take the plane to Hungary.

Wearing a large grey cap, grey tank top, shirt and tie, hegripped the arms of his wheelchair, staring at the photographers and cameramen swarming around him as he waited to go through passport control.

The man, who looks younger than his years, has told hisHungarian visitors he hopes to receive an artificial leg in his home country and his doctors say he has a better chance of recovering from his mental illness there.

He has also promised to answer all questions about his life,after he gets his new leg. For the last few weeks, his Hungarian visitors say that aim is all he can talk about.

The pieces of the Tamas’s life have slowly been fittedtogether but some are still missing.

He has mentioned a Hungarian town, a bakery, a basement anda four-storey building near a church. His speech is rusty, but his visitors say it is coming back in waves.