He narrowly escaped being transported to the German death camp at Auschwitz in June 1944 at the age of six, because a neighbor, whose son was a member of the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross Party, risked her life to hide Kanitz, his mother, and his brother in her potato cellar for seven months until the end of the war.
The neighbor who had saved his family appealed to him for the life of her own son, who was due to be hanged for his activities with the Arrow Cross Party.
Kanitz's father refused to spare him, because, he said, "saving three Jews does not wash the blood off someone who has probably killed hundreds.
His father had already been taken to a labor camp when his mother, brother, and himself were told to pack small bags, and make their way with 500 other Jews to an abandoned brick factory outside Budapest, where they would soon be transported, they were told, to a "safer place," which Kanitz later learned was the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland.
The disused factory was a muddy field the size of a football pitch containing thousands of people, with no facilities of any kind and no shelter.
But she was sick and she was crying a lot, and one afternoon I saw this guard shouting to the mother to keep this dirty little Jew quiet.
She took them to her home for a bath and clean clothes, and then the family descended into Mrs. Nagy's potato cellar, where they were to spend the next seven months.
The cellar measured eight by eight by five feet, built at the side of the house and mostly underground except for the top 18 inches, with no windows, just some light coming through wooden slats overhead.
Mrs. Nagy gave them what food she could, but was reluctant to draw attention to herself by buying and preparing more than she needed for herself, so the family lived mostly on potatoes and cabbage.
In January 1945, they began to hear bombs falling all around them, and planes flying overhead as the Allies arrived to liberate Hungary.
"We came out of the cellar and there was a group of soldiers on horses, and they were patting us on the shoulder, giving us food and chocolates, and I was sicker than a dog.
His grandparents, Shamu and Gisella (Weiss) Kanitz, had been taken to Auschwitz and their home had been ransacked, so there was nothing inside, and no food available anywhere.
"There were dead horses lying in the streets, and people were carving them up where they lay and taking the meat home.
He walked to the Austrian border, and from there traveled to Italy and then to Sheffield in England, where he found a job polishing knives.
"[2] The family was later reunited and emigrated to Canada, where Tereza Kanitz was killed by a drunk driver in Terrace, British Columbia in 1964.