News and Events

Remembering the Holocaust

As a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Peter has been involved in Holocaust education during the last dozen or so years; first at schools, but later at various organisation and public bodies. Last year Peter was particularly busy giving talks including in 2024:

  • to MPs at Portcullis House
  • in The Scottish Parliament
  • at the Scottish Civil Service
  • the Metropolitan Police

He has been invited to talk in 2025 at:

  • the Ministry of Defence
  • the Ministry of Work and Pensions
  • Cambridge University Higher Education, and so on.

For this work he was awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) in HM The Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2020 for Holocaust education and awareness (see Biography). He already has invitations for next year, including one to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Honours for Holocaust education

 

In the Queen’s Birthday Honours List Peter was awarded a British Empire Medal ‘for services to Holocaust education and awareness.’ The Investiture had been postponed more than once, but finally it took place on 27 September 2021 in Westminster Abbey. That some restrictions had to be observed, as a result of the pandemic, made the occasion even more moving.

Tissot Play Goes to Tate Britain

On Monday 5 March 2018 a rather unusual event happened at Tate Britain. After the venerable museum closed its doors to the public, and reopened to a group of special friends, a rehearsed reading of Peter Lantos’s fourth play, Light and Shadow took place in the Tissot Room of the exhibition of Impressionists in London.

This play was written well before the exhibition was even conceived, but its presentation in a room full of Tissot’s pictures was an extraordinarily happy coincidence. The play is the story of Tissot’s extraordinary love affair with Kate Newton – the muse of many of his paintings – a beautiful, divorced, Irish Catholic with an illegitimate child. Their love survived the official prejudices of the puritanical Victorian era and only ended with Kate’s premature death. Tissot, the most successful chronicler of London’s social life left for Paris after three days of mourning, never to return.

The play was directed by Sarah Berger in the production of the So and So Arts Club. Ben Porter played Tissot, and Georgie Oulton was Kate. Other actors included Jessica Claire, Nigel Fairs, Sian E Green and George Potts.

 

Rehearsed reading Peter’s third play, Stolen Years

Despite the inclement weather of freezing cold and icy snow on 1 March 2018, The Tristan Bates Theatre, Covent Garden, London was full for the first rehearsed reading of Stolen Years. The play reflects the febrile times of 1989 on the eve of the collapse of Communism in Hungary. Four friends meet in an apartment in Budapest after thirty years. One of them, Robi has returned from New York where he fled after the failed Revolution of 1956. His arrival revives painful memories of deceit, torture and lies, and triggers the uncertainties of the future.

The play was directed by Dave Spencer in the production of the So and So Arts Club. The cast included Kate Harper, Keith Hill, Tony Keetch and Louise Templeton.

Article in the Guardian about a remarkable book SURVIVOR

The Weekend Magazine of the Guardian’s 14 January 2017 issue had an interview with six Holocaust survivors, including Peter Lantos; each accompanied by portraits from Harry Boden’s book, Survivor published by Cassell. The beautifully produced book, with a forward by Howard Jacobson is a collection of 102 portraits, each accompanied by a few sentences written by the subject in their own handwriting and complemented by brief biographies at the end. Harry is an internationally known portrait photographer who worked on this project for years and the result is moving; uplifting rather than depressing. The Guardian