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. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, all but 15,000 of whom were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau.