September 2023 Portrait of the Month — Péter Kutas

Péter Kutas

We have never featured Péter Kutas as a subject before, but we were drawn to this sweet portrait of a young boy. By the time he was seven years old in 1944, Peter had witnessed many terrible things in his hometown of Budapest. His father was conscirpted for forced labor, and never returned. He witnessed a brutal pogrom in which family members were killed. And eventually when living in the Budapest Ghetto, he lost his mother in a bombing. Péter survived the war and eventually studied engineering and started a family.

When Memory Project founders Laurie Weisman and Roz Jacobs brought the Face-to-Face workshop to Budapest with new Hungarian subjects (including Péter), they heard a moving speech from the head of the Jewish community in Hungary, András Heisler. He said it is still not easy to be a Jew in Hungary and that the Memory Project exhibit and workshop are a critical contribution to telling the human story of what happened to the Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust. We were glad to contribute to honoring the memory of all Hungarian Jews who suffered during the Holocaust, including Peter and his family.