A Childhood Journey To Belsen offers a chilling reminder

Peter Lantos, prisoner 8431 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was deported from Hungary with his family in 1944. His father died of starvation but he and his mother survived. He will talk about life in Belsen, liberation, his return to Hungary, life behind the Iron Curtain and his life in England.

He will speak at a worrying time for the world with the rise of the far right in so many places.

“I've been quite busy. I've done quite a few talks. I've talked to the Members of Parliament and I went to Edinburgh to talk to the Scottish Parliament and I've also spoken to the Metropolitan Police. It is something that I started to do after my first book was published. There was a launch at a London book shop and colleagues and friends of mine said to me they didn't know that this had happened to me. I started getting invitations to speak and it was very difficult because of the fact that what I was talking about was very personal to me but I started to realise that it was actually a moral obligation to talk about this if someone asked me and until now I have never said no. My generation is the last that can say that they were actually there. In a few years’ time there won't be any of us left that can stand up and say I was there and in the future the Holocaust will be discussed or denied or whatever. We owe it to people to stand up and say it happened.

“And I am worried about the world and it's not just the rise of anti-Semitism. It's the things that you see happening in France and America. But I just feel that the new generation has very little knowledge of history, and that doesn't help. People tend to forget about the Holocaust. For many people it's something in the very distant past. When I came here to live in 1968 at the time everybody knew what had happened in Hungary in 1956, that there had been an uprising against the communist system that had been oppressed by Soviet tanks but now nobody knows because 1956 is such a long time ago. And really it is the same with the Holocaust.

“For me, surviving was a question of luck. People keep saying that being a survivor is an achievement but it is luck. But with me there was another factor.

"My mother looked after me and without her I would not still be here to say this to you. My father did not survive and many other members of my family did not survive. In all 21 members of my family perished.

“My father was a very good father. When he came home, he would read books to me. It was a warm family and when he died there was such a vacuum, and the other vacuum was my older brother who was 14 years my senior who had been sent to hard labour. He was 19 at the time. He came back and died of abdominal typhoid fever and I think of what they could have done and how they could have been part of my life. But after being in Belsen at five or six I can actually say that I did have a happy childhood which does sound a contradiction but that's all because of my mother. When we got home somehow there was no time to brood about Belsen because my mother had to establish a livelihood. I enjoyed school and it became important.”