My Childhood Journey to Belsen: Peter Lantos with Professor Gilly Carr OBE

Thu 30 January 2025

Zoom Video Conferencing

Born in 1939 in Southeast Hungary, Peter Lantos was deported to Bergen-Belsen at the age of 5. He and his mother later escaped when British forces liberated the concentration camp, only to have his young adulthood coloured by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

By the age of 30, Peter had survived Bergen-Belsen, was beaten by the Communist police in Hungary, qualified in medicine, defected to England, sentenced to imprisonment for this “crime” in his absence and had established a career in academic medicine in London.

He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and in his previous life he was an internationally known clinical neuroscientist who has retired from a Chair at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. After retirement, it was his childhood experiences that gave him the impetus to write his first book, Parallel Lines. He is also the author of a novel, Closed Horizon, and a trilogy of plays, collectively entitled Stolen Lives.

Cost: Free