From the age of seven, Stockhausen lived in Altenberg, where he received his first piano lessons from the Protestant organist of the Altenberg Cathedral, Franz-Josef Kloth (Kurtz 1992, 14). In 1938 his Father remarried. His new wife, Luzia, had been the family's housekeeper. The couple had two daughters (Kurtz 1992, 18). Because his relationship with his new stepmother was less than happy, in January 1942 Karlheinz became a boarder at the teachers' training college in Xanten, where he continued his piano training and also studied oboe and violin (Kurtz 1992, 18). In 1941 he learned that his mother had died, ostensibly from leukemia, although everyone at the same hospital had supposedly died of the same disease. It was generally understood that she had been a victim of the Nazi policy of killing "useless eaters" (Stockhausen 1989a, 20–21; Kurtz 1992, 19). The official letter to the family falsely claimed she had died 16 June 1941, but recent research by Lisa Quernes, a student at the Landesmusikgymnasium in Montabaur, has determined that she was gassed along with 89 other people at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre in Hesse-Nassau on 27 May 1941 (Anon. 2014). Stockhausen dramatized his mother's death in hospital by lethal injection, in Act 1 scene 2 ("Mondeva") of the opera Donnerstag aus Licht (Kurtz 1992, 213). In the autumn of 1944, he was conscripted to serve as a stretcher bearer in Bedburg (Kurtz 1992, 18). In February 1945, he met his Father for the last time in Altenberg. Simon, who was on leave from the front, told his son, "I'm not coming back. Look after things". By the end of the war, his Father was regarded as missing in action, and may have been killed in Hungary (Kurtz 1992, 19). A comrade later reported to Karlheinz that he saw his Father wounded in action (Maconie 2005, 19). Fifty-five years after the fact, a Journalist writing for the Guardian newspaper stated unequivocally, though without offering any fresh evidence, that Simon Stockhausen was killed in Hungary in 1945 (O'Mahony 2001).