This is the obituary written for a man who first had his concentration camp number removed and
decades later had it tattooed back in - with apparently small but in terms of meaning huge
change: insteed of the letter Z which was burned into the four-year-old boy in the Auschwitz
concentration camp he had an artfully curved J engraved into his left forearm in January 2015.
According to the orally transmitted family narrative Peter¿s mother¿s grandmother was Jewish
a born Levi. This was also reported by his siblings. Peter Höllenreiner had survived the
concentration camps Auschwitz Ravensbrück Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen. Having escaped hell
he returned to his native City Munich in 1945 at the age of six. His school years begin and the
world meets him as if nothing had happened. In the back in the last pew! was the school motto.
The exclusion continued. Peter Höllenreiner and his family had been subjected to Nation
Socialist persecution as so-called Gypsies. Despite democracy a new form of government and the
declaration of human rights - the old prejudices remained. And Peter lived in the country of
the former perpetrators it is home.
