The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die by Peter Lantos

Title: The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die

Author: Peter Lantos

Genre: Autobiography

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st March 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 224

Price: $23.95

Synopsis: A story of survival, of love between mother and son and of enduring hope in the face of unspeakable hardship. An important read. The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die describes an extraordinary journey, made by Peter, a boy of five, through war-torn Europe in 1944 and 1945. Peter and his parents set out from a small Hungarian town, travelling through Austria and then Germany together. Along the way, unforgettable images of adventure flash one after another: sleeping in a tent and then under the sky, discovering a disused brick factory, catching butterflies in the meadows – and as Peter realises that this adventure is really a nightmare – watching bombs falling from the blue sky outside Vienna, learning maths from his mother in Belsen. All this is drawn against a background of terror, starvation, infection and, inevitably, death, before Peter and his mother can return home. Author Professor Peter Lantos is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and in his previous life was an internationally renowned clinical neuroscientist. His memoir, Parallel Lines (Arcadia Books, 2006) was translated into Hungarian, German and Italian. Closed Horizon (Arcadia, 2012) was his first novel. Peter was awarded the British Empire Medal in 2020 for ‘services to Holocaust education and awareness’. He is one of the last of the generation of survivors and this – his first book for children – will serve as a testimony to his experience. Peter lives in London.

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Hungary, 1944 – Peter and his family has thus far escaped the horrors that the Nazi regime has brought to other Jewish people. But as the war inches towards its end, the Nazis turn their attention to Hungary, moving its Jewish population from their homes, into a ghetto, and finally, all the way up until the end of the war, into concentration camps – and Peter ends up in Bergen-Belsen with his parents, whilst the rest of his family is separated, taken on different transports and never heard from again. For Peter, his parents do their best to hide the danger from him, and he finds an old brick factory to play in, learns maths, and travels across Vienna, Germany, and other parts of Europe. What seems like an adventure at first becomes a terrifying experience: starvation, infection, and death – and Peter and his mother are doing all they can to survive before they can get home to Hungary, at the end of the war, where they must make a choice – to live in the Soviet zone or live in the zones controlled by democracy. It is a journey that will shape the rest of Peter’s life, and the decisions he makes as he grows up.

We all know about the Holocaust – the facts, the figures, and stories from the countries that Germany invaded that suffered so much, and we have the well-known stories of people like Anne Frank. We know the names of the camps. But rarely have I read an account – fictional or biographical – of the experience of being Jewish in a country that at the start of the war, was an ally of Germany as Hungary was. And this is Peter’s experience – he lived in Hungary, an ally of Germany up until 1944 – and based on his recollections, it seemed that in Hungary, the Jews – at least the ones he knew, did not suffer as others did until the Nazis invaded. As this is based on his experience and knowledge, it is just as important because it allows us to see how people understood what was going on around them, especially as a child for whom the war and danger was abstract – even when his older brother is sent away.

For Peter, the war becomes real when he starts to see death and is crammed into small train carriages with hundreds of other people, and separated from Aunt Anna and ZsuZsi forever, and as time goes on as he is in Bergen-Belsen, things become more real, more threatening and he begins to feel the effects of starvation. Peter’s ordeal is only sixteen months long, but throughout this time he has suffered a lot, has endured so much more loss, and it is the final scenes post-liberation that are powerful and emotionally driven – the entire book is serious and necessary, but once Peter realises what he and his family have really been through, I feel like that’s when it started to hit home a lot more, because throughout the book, the adults around him were trying to protect him, compared to other books for middle grade and young adult readers set in World War II where we see the horrors front and centre.

Yet it is this protection and being able to see the world of concentration camps through the eyes of such a young child that drives home how awful it was, and how we should be working to never let this happen again anywhere. Peter’s experience is important to help us understand how war can impact people of all ages and how we respond to trauma and find our way in the world after something traumatic. This is an important book, a reminder that the Holocaust had such a broad reach and affected so many people and families – millions of people. It serves as a way to teach us what happened and how it has gone on to influence the way its survivors respond to the world in the words of one of the remaining Holocaust survivors. To me it was a deeply moving and personal story that gives yet another voice to the Holocaust and separates the names and personalities and the real people from the facts, and adds to the facts, and our understanding. We need books like this to give faces to these tragedies and to remind us that there will always be more than the facts and figures – there is always a human face that should never be forgotten.