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Doctors using DNA tests have restored the identity, real name, and past to one of the the last prisoners of the second world war. Andras Tamas, a Royal Hungarian Army private taken prisoner on the Russian front in 1945, is in fact 75-year-old Andras Toma. The confused and incommunicative PoW was discovered by a visiting Slovak doctor this summer in a run-down ward of Russia's Kotelnichy psychiatric hospital near Kazan, some 750 miles east of Moscow, where he had been isolated for 53 of his 55 years incaptivity. The doctor, who can understand Hungarian, realised that the inmate was rambling and gibbering not in Russian but in Hungarian, which is not a Slavonic language.
After rescuing the PoW from the Russian mental hospital on August 12, Professor Andras Veer, the director of Hungary's National Psychiatric and Neurological Institute in Budapest, and...