Peter-Uri Frankenstein was born in Berlin in January 1943. His Jewish parents Leonie and Walter Frankenstein had to perform forced labor, thus initially evading deportation. They escaped “Operation Factory” by chance. They decided to go underground and hide with Leonie’s mother in Leipzig. Following her arrest, they returned to Berlin in September 1943. They were able to hide there in the home of Arthur Ketzer.
After Ketzer’s building was destroyed in an air raid in February 1944, Leonie Frankenstein posed as a bombed-out woman whose papers had been destroyed. She claimed her one-year-old son was the illegitimate child of an unknown man. She and Peter-Uri were evacuated to the Brandenburg village of Briesenhorst (now Brzeźno, Poland), where Peter-Uri was called Peter Gerhard to disguise his origins. His brother Michael was born in September 1944.
Under threat of her identity being revealed, Leonie Frankenstein had to return to Berlin with her children at the end of 1944. The family hid together in Berlin until the city’s liberation in early May of 1945. In November 1945 Leonie Frankenstein emigrated to Palestine with Peter-Uri and Michael.