THE BOY FROM AUSCHWITZ

PETER HÖUENBEINER - THE SINTO WHO WAS ALSO A JEW

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 an apparently small but in terms of meaning huge change: instead 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 of Munich in 1945 at the age of six. His school years began and the world meets him as if nothing had happened. "In the back in the last row" was the school motto.

The exclusion continued. Peter Höllenreiner and his family had been subjected to National Socialist persecution as so-called "Gvosies". 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 his home!