Miklos Kanitz

Miklos Samual Kanitz (1939 – November 9, 2006) was a Hungarian-Canadian Holocaust survivor living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. 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.

In 1946, Kanitz's father became secretary of his local Communist Party and later still, deputy-minister of industry for Hungary. In his role as party secretary, his job was to oversee the post-war judicial system in his area. 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."

Awaiting transport to Auschwitz Kanitz was six years old and living in Budapest with his parents, Miklos and Tereza Kanitz, and his older brother, Gyula, when the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944. 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.

Kanitz died on November 9, 2006.