On the day I am due to interview neuroscientist and author Peter Lantos in his Marylebone flat, London is submerged under three inches of snow, and the trains are at a standstill.
Thankfully, technology means that we can still do the interview, but chatting through a computer screen is no substitute for meeting someone in their own home.
It is clear that Lantos agrees, telling me proudly about his signed Chagall print: “If you’d have come, you would have seen it” (more on that later), and: “Sorry you didn’t come because you could have seen volumes and volumes of scientific things I have written.”
Now he has another publication to put on his bookshelf. The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die chronicles his experience from 1944 to 1945 of being forced into the ghetto near his home in Makó, south-east Hungary, his deportation to Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and his return to Hungary after liberation.
Unlike his previous book, Parallel Lines, where he tells his story from an adult’s perspective, The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die puts the reader firmly into the mind of five to six-year-old Lantos.
Now 83, Lantos says his latest book is aimed at “children between roughly eight and 12, but I think that all children up to 100 can read it”.
As someone who is far beyond 12, I found the book absolutely compelling, partly because it is a true story of extraordinary resilience and survival in unimaginable circumstances, but also because Lantos’ stark recollections make very powerful reading.
He writes that soon after arriving at Bergen-Belsen, “We saw that dead bodies were being carried […] I couldn’t help looking. The bodies didn’t look very heavy. They looked a bit like sacks being lifted from one place to another.”
His straightforward writing style mirrors the way a young child sees the world. “I didn’t want to write a sentimental book. I hope that the children will feel that they are travelling with me, rather than crying, [that they have] the feeling that they are in the cold and that they feel hunger.”
Perhaps this precise approach stems from his work as an internationally renowned neuroscientist, who has written more than 500 scientific articles, as well as medical textbooks.
After finally being granted an exit visa from Hungary, which was then under communist rule, he came to the UK in 1968 to take up a research fellowship at the Wellcome Trust, later working at Middlesex Hospital and the Maudsley. In 2001, he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Recalling the transition from academic writing to memoir in 2006, when he wrote Parallel Lines, Lantos says it was “a shock to change from the style that I had been practising for 40 years of writing medical, scientific papers — which should be objective — to then sit down and write something that is very personal and full of feeling. [This is] probably why I try not to get overly sentimental.”
How was he able to remember the details of places, journeys and conversations so vividly in The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die? “There are various layers of memory. What I remember very well was the physical hardship, the starvation, the cold, the going to wash in ice-cold water.”
The other details were “a gradual recollection” since when they first returned to Hungary, his mother avoided discussing what they had lived through.“It was only when I became a teenager that I started to ask questions and I heard the reconstruction [from her].”
In 2003, Lantos returned to Hungary to make the same journey to Belsen he had made as a child “ to trigger off certain events, the memory of which had faded away”. During the visit, he was given access to various archives and met other people who had lived through the Holocaust, and forensically uncovered his past.
These two journeys, almost 60 years apart, were put into Parallel Lines, but during lockdown, Lantos put his experience of the Holocaust down on paper once again, this time for a younger audience.
“I feel we have a moral obligation to tell the story and the reason for that is that we are the last generation who survived. Once we die, there won’t be anybody who can say: ‘I was there.’”
Lantos speaks regularly at schools, so he already had an insight into how children would respond to his book. “The reaction is always surprise: ‘How did this happen?’, ‘How did you survive?’, What are your memories?’, ‘How did it affect your future life?’ That comes from children or students, whatever their background.”
After liberation, while most survivors started a new life in a new country, Lantos returned to Hungary and stayed there for more than 20 years. “My mother was really desperate to be reunited with my brother [Gyuri, who had been called up to do hard labour] and also other members of her large family.”
Lantos’ mother restarted the family’s timber business with two of her brothers, which was “quite lucrative” until the communists took over Hungary completely in 1949, forcing them to close it down.
How did he manage to reintegrate into daily life seemingly smoothly after living through the horrors of Bergen-Belsen? “I didn’t actually intentionally block it out, but somehow, for a child of six, seven, eight, there was no time to think.”
He absorbed himself in his studies — “I wanted to be a good pupil” — but “there were always reminders, even if you didn’t want them. Every year, there was a special service at the local synagogue of the day we were deported, [where] they read out all the names of people who had died.” Twenty-one members of Lantos’ family were murdered by the Nazis.
As in his writing, Lantos keeps his emotions in check during our conversation. The only time there is a slight wobble in his equilibrium is when he talks about the death of his mother, to whom, says Lantos, he owes his survival.
“Surviving is not an achievement, it’s a question of luck. But that luck was that I had a mother who looked after me extremely well.”
Even when conditions were unimaginably dire, his mother would be punctilious in making sure Lantos washed, would ration their meagre meals so there was always food available, and after liberation, was strict about Lantos not overeating, a cause of death in some survivors whose bodies had been ravaged by starvation.
“There’s this cliche of the overpowering Jewish mother. She wasn’t one, but I knew that I was deeply loved. She obviously looked after me and cared a great deal.” Her death in 1968 was “quite a terrible experience and, in a way, that was the time when I finally really grew up.”
The loss of his mother influenced Lantos’ decision to stay in the UK and indirectly led to him buying his Chagall print. “I saved enough money from the Wellcome Fellowship to be able to buy a Mini because in Hungary it was impossible for a junior doctor a) —to buy any car and b) — a car like a Mini.
Peter's mother before she died
"So I had in mind to drive back to Hungary. But with the money I saved, I [instead] bought the beautiful Chagall print, Moses and His People.”
Lantos’ CV makes impressive reading.
As well as his scientific achievements, he has served on the boards of a number of charities. After retirement, “I reinvented myself as a self-employed author”.
Aside from his memoirs, he has also written a novel and several plays. His latest, So Great a Love, is about the righteous gentile Jane Haining. He is hoping to put it on “if a very rich reader of the Jewish Chronicle would like to support it”, he says with a smile.
When he isn’t writing, Lantos helps out at the drop-in centre for asylum seekers at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, where he had a barmitzvah just before his 70th birthday, having been denied one when living under communist rule in Hungary.
Lantos gives the impression that he can accomplish anything he puts his mind to, unfazed by its challenges, a characteristic that was fortified by living through the Holocaust.
“Having survived Belsen has become a source of strength because the idea was that if I survived Belsen, I would survive everything, with the exception of my own death.”
Rather than Belsen being “a terrible psychological burden”, Lantos says it was “just the opposite. I felt stronger having been there.”
‘The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die’ is published by Scholastic
