Peter Stern was born in Nuremberg, Germany in March 1936. His father was an auto mechanic and a vocational school instructor. His mother helped raise Peter and his younger brother. One of his first vivid memories was walking home with his father and stones were being thrown at them by a group of of young boys not much older than him. Peter couldn’t understand why this was happening, nor why people stood by and watched it happen. In 1941, his family was deported from Germany to a holding camp in Latvia that was surrounded by frozen water, though no fences, and guards patrolled the perimeter. In the spring of 1942 they were transferred to the Riga ghetto and were crammed into a room with other families.
