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Family of Peter Ahmed Yehudah Löwenthal

Peter was the child of Rabbi Erich Isaac Lowenthal and Ilse Minna "Miriam" Marienthal, and the brother of my late mother, Chaninah. He was born in Palestine and died in Bergen Belsen after working in the resistance as a young man.

Peter's death certificate

Peter was the child of Rabbi Erich Isaac Löwenthal and Ilse Minna "Miriam" Marienthal, and the brother of my late mother, Chaninah.  He was born in Tel Aviv, Palestine, where his Jewish parents had a small business called Orientalia manufacturing mother-of-pearl rosaries.  He and his parents moved to Berlin, Germany when he was a young child, which was where my mother was born in 1931.  His parents separated when he was young, and his mother and sister moved to Amsterdam while he remained with his father in Berlin for a while before joining his mother, sister, and maternal grandmother in Amsterdam around 1935.  After things got bad, he and his family were sheltered for a time by their cleaning lady; I regret that I do not know her name. Later he and his mother got false papers and "passed" as gentiles while working in the underground, his little sister was in hiding, and his grandmother was staying with a gentile family.  Chaninah was hidden by various people but spent the most time with Ali and Thomas Mook in Utrecht, the Netherlands, together with their six children and a Jewish boy they were also hiding. Peter's grandmother Addy Bernstein perished in Auschwitz on Dec. 8, 1942. Peter was betrayed by a double agent, and was jailed in Haaren in 1942, and was sent to Westerbork, then Theresienstadt, and then Bergen-Belsen.  In Bergen-Belsen, he was miraculously reunited with his mother, Ilse, who was with him when he died of typhoid and starvation.  She survived the war and located her surviving daughter Chaninah in Utrecht. They returned to Amsterdam, where my mother attended "gymnasium" for a time before they were assisted in immigrating to the United States by HIAS (Then the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) and Ilse's ex-husband Erich, who had remarried and was living in Massachusetts. Chaninah became a college teacher and married Henry Maschler.  They had twin daughters, Toni Maschler and Rina Maschler, who became an immigration and asylum attorney and a psychologist, respectively. Erich died on January 8, 1984 in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA, where he had lived with his second wife Suzanne, with whom he had two children. Ilse died on October 1, 1986. She had been a Hebrew teacher until a very advanced age in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York.  Chaninah died on August 7, 2014, in the house where she had lived in Annapolis, MD, USA.  Sincerely, Toni Maschler P.S. My late mother's obituary is here

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