Peter Rosenfeld Span was born on May 19, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia).
When Belgrade was bombarded by the Luftwaffe in April 1941, Peter's family moved to Subotica which had been annexed to Hungary. In 1942, Ignac, Peter's father, was sent to Hungarian forced labor camps.
Following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Elisabeth, Peter's mother, with her three children, Ivan, Pablo and Peter were sent to the Subotica ghetto and then to Bácsalmás, where they boarded a train heading to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the way, in the city of Szeged, the rear wagons of the train, including the one they were on, were disconnected and attached to another train that was heading to the Strasshof transit camp in Austria. The Jews who had been separated from the original train were sent to work as forced laborers in Austria, as part of the negotiations between Rezső Kasztner and Adolf Eichmann which resulted in the "blood for goods" plan. Peter, his siblings and mother, were sent from Strasshof to the town Ulrichskirchen, to a small labor camp. They were liberated almost a year later by the Red Army and returned to their home in Subotica. In 1947, they immigrated to Mexico.