Peter Gerhard Eduard Lassally was born on Oct. 14, 1932, in Hamburg, Germany, to Paul Lassally, a coffee importer and exporter, and Else Lassally, who ran the home.
In 1938, his family fled the Nazis, settling in Amsterdam, where Peter, a violin prodigy, continued to play and his sister, Irene, attended grade school with Anne Frank.
Several years later, his father died of cancer, and soon after, in 1943, he and his mother and sister were sent to Westerbork, a Nazi transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands. They were next imprisoned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in what was then Czechoslovakia, where his sister was part of a group that built gas chambers. Among the atrocities Peter witnessed was a baby being hanged from a lamppost.
“It was a hard time for all of us,” he told NPR.
The family survived and, in 1947, sailed for New York, where they settled in Queens. Peter graduated from Newtown High School and started his show business career, first as an usher at Radio City Music Hall and then as a page at NBC.
In the 1950s, he produced nationally broadcast programs for the NBC radio network, including “Monitor” and “Nightline,” where he hired rising comic talents like Mike Nichols and Elaine May. He also produced “PM East/PM West,” a late-night TV talk show hosted by Mike Wallace and Joyce Davidson, from 1961 to 1962, and radio and television shows with Arthur Godfrey, a megastar of the era.
