Every October, Peter Lantos receives a letter from Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp he was sent to as a child in 1944.
“It’s a letter wishing me all the best on my birthday,” he says. Lantos considers it a sign of acceptance, reconciliation and friendship. “They are, in a way, saying we are delighted that you survived. It’s a nice gesture.”
Peter Lantos was born in 1939 in the town of Makó in Hungary. His family owned a timber yard and his earliest memories are idolising his older brother Gyuri and playing with his cousin Zsuzsi among the logs and planks.
Hungary was a Nazi ally until Germany invaded in March 1944, concerned that Soviet advances would cause the country to switch sides. The occupiers forced the Jewish population to move to
